Exposing the Event. a Curatorial Investigation of the Aesthetics of Novelty in the Portuguese Revolution

Exposing the Event. A Curatorial Investigation of the Aesthetics of Novelty in the Portuguese Revolution

Carolina Rito

A practice-based thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. in Curatorial/Knowlegde Department of Visual Cultures Goldsmiths College University of London Supervised by Irit Rogoff

London, March, 2016

I hereby declare that the following work is my own.

Carolina Rito London, March, 2016

ABSTRACT

Exposing the Event dissertation sets up the curatorial as an aesthetic investigative practice able to read the representations and manifestations of the ‘new’—and what they efface—in the expanded field of cultural activity. Through a curatorial approach the ‘new’ is examined as a constellation of aesthetic manifestations and exposures, only able to signify under an apparatus that renders them visible, sayable and thinkable (Rancière, 2004). Considering a historical event as a cultural manifestation of the new, the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976) serves as the framework of this investigation. The three chapters draw on visual and aural material—documentary, essay and militant cinema—of the Portuguese Revolution, made during the PREC (Ongoing Revolutionary Process) and in the present.

Chapter One introduces the film Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977) set in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution, in order to problematise the mechanisms of ‘event’ production as an unexpected manifestation of a historical new. Chapter Two explores the notion of the ‘return of the secret gaze’ (Kuster, 2007) in order to disclose a multiplicity of layers of representation in the exhibitionary space of Torre Bela. Chapter Three addresses the ‘right to narrate’ unmoving histories through Grada Kilomba’s intervention in the film Conakry (César, 2013) and the haunted memories of Ventura in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). The proposed readings aim to address the ‘non-revolted’ affects of the post-revolutionary present.

A series of transcriptions, images and performative texts are woven into the dissertation. These materials include an interview with Pedro Costa (2015), and an array of stills from Torre Bela (1977). Their insertion aims to animate the curatorial as an investigative practice capable of intersecting different registers of material and set them in dialogue.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 11 Overview 11 Theoretical Frames of Reference and Terminology 12 The Exhibition 13 Exposures 18 Revolution 19 The Curatorial 21 Aesthetics 29 Driving Questions 30 Methodology and Chapters Outline 32 Suspending the Event’s Disruption—the ‘Non-Event’ in Torre Bela 34 Wilson’s Dream of Becoming an Actor and the ‘Exhibitionary 35 Complex’ in Torre Bela Actualising Revolution—The Non-Revolted Affects and ‘Continuities’ 36 of The Portuguese Revolution

I 40

CHAPTER ONE 41 Suspending the Event’s Disruption—the ‘Non-Event’ in Torre Bela 41 Introduction 41 Event: The Portuguese Carnation Revolution 47 ‘complexity and vibration of the ‘real’’ in Torre Bela 52 Staging the Occupation Scene and the Space Behind-the-Camera 57 On the Opening Up of the Evental Space—The Swarm of Events 62 The Cinematic Apparatus as Dispositif 64 ‘Representing Reality’ in the Documentary Film Genre 67 Prescribing the Event 74 The ‘Non-Event’ 79

Conclusion 83

VISUAL ESSAY ONE The Occupation Scene 86

II 107

CHAPTER TWO 109 Wilson’s Dream of Becoming an Actor and the ‘Exhibitionary 109 Complex’ in Torre Bela Introduction 109 I 112 The All-Encompassing View of Torre Bela 117 ‘The Return of the [Deployed] Real’ 121 II 125 III 130 Torre Bela and its ‘Exhibitionary Complex’ 131 Politics in the Space of Exhibition and Representation 136 Conclusion 150

VISUAL ESSAY TWO The Aerial View 155

III 163

CHAPTER THREE 165 Actualising Revolution—The Non-Revolting Affects And ‘Continuities’ 165 Of The Portuguese Revolution Introduction 165 Introduction [to my revolution] 166 Revolution: Freedom, Violence and Silence 173 The Absent-Presence at the Dinner Party with John Cage 181 ‘The Name Amílcar Cabral Was Never Revealed to Me in My History Books’ 186

Revolution and its ‘Continuities’ 194 The Suspension of the Grammar of Change in Ventura’s Phantasmatic 204 Memories Conclusion 214

VISUAL ESSAY THREE The Palm Trees 217

CONCLUSION 222 Overview 222 The Three ‘Modalities of Exposure’ for the Curatorial Practices 225 The ‘Non-Event’ 228 The ‘Sensing’ 230 The ‘Continuities’ 233 Contributions and Scope for Further Research and Development 234

APPENDICES 238 BES REVELEÇÃO, Marco Mendes, 2012 239 Interview with Pedro Costa Conducted by Laura Mulvey, September 2015 241

BIBLIOGRAPHY 257

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1—Booklet Cooperativa Agricola Popular da Torre Bela, ‘Portico’ poem, p. 1

Fig. 2, 3, 4 and 5 – The occupation scene of the palace in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video stills: 89’10’’, 85’56’’, 85’20’’, 84’20’’. Clockwise direction starting on the left hand corner.

Fig. 6—Kids jumping to the water for money in Vampires of Poverty (Ospina and Mayolo, 1977)

Fig. 7—Jason performing in front of the camera in Portrait of Jason (Clarke, 1967). Video still: 41’44’’

Fig. 8—Gathering in the public square in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still: 26’20’’

Fig. 9—Aerial shot of Torre Bela’s main gate. Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

Fig. 10—Aerial shot of Torre Bela estate. Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

Fig. 11 and 12—Juxtaposition of the aerial view showing the main gate in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977) (on the left), and my visit to Torre Bela in 2015 (on the right).

Fig. 13—Squatters waving from the ground to Harlan on the helicopter in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

Fig. 14 and 15—The crowd in a public meeting (on the left) where Wilson gets emotional during his speech in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video Stills.

Fig. 16 and 17—Fragments of a letter sent by my father to his parents on 24 February 1970.

Fig. 18—French Fixed-Term Working Permission (‘Carte Ordinaire de Travail a Validité Limitée’) of my father (Luís Nuno e Sousa de Oliveira Rito)

Fig. 19, 20, 21 and 22—The military and the people in the streets of Lisbon on 25 April 1974. Documentation Centre 25th April (Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril).

Fig. 23—Grada Kilomba reading her text in front of Amilcar Cabral’s reels in Conakry (César, 2013). Video still.

Fig. 24 and 25—Grada Kilomba reading her text in front of Amilcar Cabral’s reels in Conakry (César, 2013). Video stills.

Fig. 26, 27, and 28—Video clip ‘Conquistador’, DaVinci, 1989. The band plays in front of the Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon, where the colonial exhibition of the Portuguese World was held (on the left), and in a Caravela (the Portuguese sailing ship developed in the fifteenth century) (centre and right). Video stills.

Fig. 29—Monument to the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) on the bank of Tagus River in Lisbon (Telmo and Almeida, 1940)—the 25 April Bridge, previously called António Oliveira Salazar, can be seen in the backdrop.

Fig. 30—Público’s newspaper cover, Brasil Descoberto (Discovered Brasil), 5 March 2014.

Fig. 31—Ventura and Vitalina in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Still.

Fig. 32 and 33—Ventura (on the left) and Ventura and Tito Furtado (on the right) in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

Fig. 34 and 35—Ventura and Vitalina (left), and Vitalina (right) in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

Fig. 36 and 37—Ventura and the ‘freedom fighter’ in the elevator in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

Fig. 38—Ventura in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Still.

Visual Essay

The Occupation Scene in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video stills: 80'-89'

The Aerial View in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video Stills: 8''-2'24''

The Palm Trees Scene in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977).Video stills: 2'26''-2'50''

INTRODUCTION

Overview

Exposing the Event. A Curatorial Investigation of the Aesthetics of Novelty in the Portuguese Revolution researches the representations and manifestations of the ‘new’—and what they efface—in the expanded field of cultural activity. Considering that the new needs to be recognised as novelty in order to signify, this thesis investigates the aesthetic manifestations of the ‘new’ as a historical and situated construct. As for a cultural manifestation of the new, the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976) serves as the conceptual and material framework of this investigation. The Portuguese Revolution provides the aural and visual material to grasp the ‘visible, sayable and thinkable’ of the historical event; and, most importantly, the contained aesthetic tensions of what is left invisible, unsayable and inaudible in the post-revolutionary present. The three chapters draw on documentary, essay and militant cinema related to the Portuguese Revolution, and directed during the PREC (Ongoing Revolutionary Process)1 and in the present.

This dissertation explores the epistemic potentialities of the curatorial in the field of visual cultures. In Exposing the Event the curatorial is able to propose new epistemic tools capable of sensing barely recognisable gestures, unaccountable discourses and invisible presences blurred by the hegemonic logics and narratives of the ‘new’. The research actualises the notion of ‘revolution’ in the present, as a scripted phenomenon, dependent on the repetition of aesthetic manifestations and of a grammar of novelty. This verification undermines the revolution as the disruption of the historical time able to install a new and fairer order. Rather, the revolution is devised as a fragile suspension of the old order, under which instituted power structures claim universal emancipation and transformation.

The curatorial, as an inter-disciplinary and aesthetic investigative practice, examines revolution in its exhibitionary components, i.e., event, discourse,

1 After the Carnation Revolution the Ongoing Revolutionary Process ran for almost two years.

11 exposures, and juxtapositions. Revolution’s components are articulated as exposures at the site of tensions between material and affects that do not depend on an intentional exhibiting gesture. Rather, exposures acknowledge power dynamics, mechanisms of production and effaced affects at play in the declamation of the revolutionary event. To read these exposures, the curatorial opens up the field of exhibition-making to a new arena of knowledge production, located at the intersection of visual cultures, contemporary art and critical theory.

To claim the curatorial as a continuous and inter-disciplinary investigative practice contributes to the expansion of the field, making the curatorial operative beyond mere practices of display and exhibition—‘showing and telling’. As a consequence, the present research project also contributes to the idiosyncrasy of practice-based research in the domain of visual cultures.

Theoretical Frames of Reference and Terminology

In this section of the Introduction I aim to lay out the theoretical ground from where I depart in order to actualise ‘revolution’ and deploy ‘exhibition’ as an epistemic tool capable of reading unintentional exposures in the expanded field of exhibition-making. This section aims to introduce debates around exhibition- making and the curatorial that, despite having fostered my research and being in constant dialogue with its urgencies will not be intensively and directly discoursed in the next three chapters. The three chapters do not intend to contextualize and explain theoretical debates in the field of the curatorial, but rather to enact an aesthetic investigation and to activate the epistemic tools to contribute to the foundation of the curatorial as an inter-disciplinary practice.

Although I come to this dissertation from a background in exhibition studies and my practice in the field of curating, this PhD dissertation goes beyond the contemporary debate on exhibition studies and curating. Rather than engaging in an analysis of exhibition formats and their genealogy, the following chapters intend to animate the curatorial as an investigative practice capable of reading

12 latent affects dismissed in hegemonic discourses. It does so via three speculative and investigative figures enacted in the expanded field of the ‘exhibitionary’. These epistemic tools are: ‘non-event’, ‘sensing’, and ‘continuities’.

The Exhibition

This dissertation explores ‘exhibition’ as a curatorial tool beyond exhibition- making and public display. ‘Exhibition’ (or ‘exposures’—as it will be actualised) is advanced as a concept that functions beyond the curated display of objects and people, and provides a new ground for ‘the curatorial’. ‘Exhibition’ is deployed as a field of mutual exposures intentionally and unintentionally set in relation to and operating in the broader fields of cultural activity. ‘Exhibition’ is presented as a critical and non-hierarchical approach to visual material and theoretical debates. I will demonstrate in the following chapters how an epistemic tool is capable of: assessing mechanisms of disciplinary logics; engaging with asignifying affects; and actualising stabilized notions in the present.

The problematisation around ‘exhibition’ emerges out of an examination of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Bennett, 1995). The notion devised by the Australian historian Tony Bennett encompasses the disciplines, apparatus and spaces of exhibition-making that govern knowledge production and the idea of the new citizen. I argue that the ‘exhibitionary complex’ is insufficient to understand the potentialities of ‘exhibition’ in a broader context of cultural activities—beyond the spaces of exhibition and its disciplinary logics. Instead of looking at exhibition as a discipline and modus operandi, my thesis tackles ‘exhibition’ as unintentional juxtapositions and proximities between ideas and objects, capable of producing modes of knowledge (knowability) sensitive to hidden and silenced affects. As the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy noted: knowing is being able to navigate seeming non-related affects, that are there in touch with the world, is being in exposure to its elements before they are accessed as knowable or readable (Nancy, 1998).

In order to unpack the ‘exhibitionary complex’, the thesis introduces the contemporary debate around the ‘exhibitionary’ as a complex of technologies (institutional, disciplinary, discursive, ideological, spatial, etc.). Looking at this complex allows to further contextualise the course of events that enable the figure of the curator to emerge; and lay out the frames of reference of contemporary museological institutions and exhibitionary apparatuses.

Discussions concerning the museographic display and related discourses received great attention from scholars and practitioners in the late twentieth century (O’Doherty, 1999; Crimp, 1993; Bennett, 1995; Lidchi, 2013; Dewdney, Dibosa, Walsh, 2013). These scholars identified the need for theoretical investigation of the formation and mechanisms of exhibition displays, and of the ways in which these apparatuses informed the production, reception and interpretation of contemporary art, disciplinary knowledge, and historical narratives2.

Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of modern technologies used by institutions of control to discipline forms of life (Foucault, 1979), Bennet’s investigation gives an account of a modern institution of control that Foucault left untheorised—the museum. In The Birth of the Museum (1995), Bennett provides a politically focused genealogy of the modern public museum, passing by cabinet of curiosities, international (temporary) exhibitions, and the first public museums, i.e., institutions of permanent exhibitions.

In his book Bennett traces the museums’ formation and early questions around its policies and politics (1995, p. 5). According to Bennett, the institution of permanent exhibitions—public museums—designed in the nineteenth century is informed by the idea of establishing a general archive, where time and objects are accumulated. The museum is a space set outside of temporal changes, and

2 Regarding the historical narratives, I am thinking of colonial and nationalist exhibitions realised in the late nineteenth century up until mid-twentieth century, in colonial Europe where countries’ industrial progress were exposed and colonial assets and colonized individuals—as an expression of global power and exoticism of other geographies and peoples—were showed off. In 1935 Bureau International des Expositions took over this colonial project until the present day. Under a new name and renewed face, EXPO is now not only dedicated to showcase national ‘prestige’ and identity, as can be read in their official statement online, but also welcome private companies represented by their own pavilions. The most outstanding example in the latest EXPO in Milan is the pavilion of Coca-Cola. (Bureau International des Expositions, n/d)

14 inaccessible to transformations that occur over time. Almost sacralised, early museums and their displays encompass a representational tension between the apparent universality of the subject and the object of knowledge (man), which it also helps to construct.

In Bennet’s account (1995), there is a tension between the aim to enclose time by means of accumulation and protection from disruption, on the one hand; and on the other, the effect of simultaneously constructing the modern and universal concepts of society and knowledge. This crux has been sustained, conceptualised and realised by modern institutions of display ever since the late nineteenth century.

Reviewing Michel Foucault’s philosophical propositions about the asylum, the clinic and the prison as institutional articulations of power and knowledge relations, Crimp (1993) and Bennett (1995) argue that museums are institutions of a similar nature. In an attempt to contextualise the role of permanent art exhibitions in the formation of European discourse, knowledge production and the construction of modern society, Bennett argues:

The emergence of art museums was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions – history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores – which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. (Bennett, 1995, p. 59 [my emphasis])

Early public museums framed a new field and stage for furthering the modern project of Enlightenment and of European superiority over other cultures. The project of a European cultural superiority is acquired through the intersection of: an emergence of institutions of display, the formation of new (and universal) disciplines, the legitimation of discourses, and, finally, the reinforcement of

15 ocularcentrism (since the Renaissance in Europe). ‘Institutions of permanent exhibitions’, as Bennett refers to museums, become the place where disciplinary and knowledge relations meet to legitimise one another. The birth of exhibitions and public museums cannot be thought as divorced from the attempt to institute European supremacy and dominance on a global scale.3

Progressively, from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, museological institutions opened their relics to the eyes of the public (vision was privileged over other senses in audience reception4). It was understood that the greater the number of public members exposed to the legitimised new disciplines, discourses and their technologies of visual display, the better. Over the course of time, and by being more and more familiar with these set-ups, these mechanisms of knowledge production would become internalised and replicated as universal and inevitable. To the constellation of disciplines, knowledge, discourses and power relations realised and embodied in museum displays, Bennett calls the ‘exhibitionary complex’.

As stated by Bennett, the exhibitionary complex is not homogeneous across institutions of display, because they serve different ideological and political purposes (1995, p. 80). If public museums (displaying fixed and permanent exhibitions) instituted an order of things that was meant to last and, in doing so, provided the modern state with a deep and continuous ideological framework, these lasting set-ups could not be changed to fit shorter-term ideological requirements. For these purposes, another format had to be invented. Temporary exhibitions (national or international) were the new format that permitted a new

3 The European Enlightenment as a set of mechanisms of control and governance of knowledge production, discursive formation and subjectivities, finds other modalities of exposure, which are not only based on traditional notions of display (temporary and permanent) and its legitimation. I would like to give the example of botanic expeditions, which were commissioned by colonial powers (e.g., Portugal, Spain, France and Britain) to the colonised territories from the late eighteenth century onwards. In these expeditions botanic species were catalogued according to the Enlightenment categories and quickly imposed as scientific. In other words, they were instituted as universal. For further details see José Celestino Mutis’ expedition in: Wilhite, J. F. 1980. ‘The Disciples of Mutis and the Enlightenment in New Granada: Education, History and Literature.’ In: The Americas, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Oct., 1980), pp. 179-192 4 For more literature on the critical role of ocularcentrim in Western philosophy read Martin Jay, 1994. Downcast Eye.

16 dynamism, responsiveness to urgent needs, and, ultimately, an entry point to a new model of spectacle aiming to attract more and more visitors.

Although the definition of ‘exhibition’ that I would like to devise here in the Introduction is not yet concluded; we can already hint at a more complex picture. ‘Exhibition’ is more than a set of objects on display and their accessibility to the public. ‘Exhibition’ is also the institutional mechanics that govern display and knowledge relations. In the end, ‘exhibition’ was never only about what is made visible, but also about what is made invisible by the means of visibility. By following this line of thought, I want to argue that exhibition is not what is exhibited, but the immanent network of power structures and intensities that govern what is made visible and what is made invisible. It is along these apparent contradictions that I aim to actualise ‘exhibition’ and open up its field to the unintentional exposures.

‘Exhibition’ is no longer only a neutral public display of ideas, people and objects, or an uncharged gesture of putting something ‘out there’ for an audience. Instead, Foucault and Bennett’s conceptualisations allow for an understanding where audience, exhibition, museum, discourse, interpretation, juxtaposition, cannot be thought outside of a situated ideology and historical power structures. What the exhibition seemingly turns public operates under the logics and disciplines of ideological and political programmes in a specific time in history.

As already noted, my aim is neither to make a genealogy of museums and exhibition spaces from birth to contemporaneity, nor to historically analyse the development of exhibition discourses and formats over time. However, I believe that reading Foucault, Bennett and Crimp’s projects provides insights to the complexities, ideologies, interests and intentions present in the gesture of turning something public in the form of an exhibition that is seemingly accessible to all5.

5 Although it is not within the scope of the present discussion, it is important to note that the claim of open accessibility of the modern project of museums implies only white citizenries of the imperialist and colonial powers. People of colour and from less privileged social background not only did not have access to public museums or temporary exhibitions, but when present were put onto display as representatives of ‘indigenous’ peoples from colonised geographies. For instance, the so-called indigenous people were

After a brief review about the birth of the museum as an institution of control, I argue that enunciating ‘exhibition’ can no longer signify a show of objects and persons in/by institutions of display, but that it also resonates with the mechanisms that govern and control what is displayed and the discourses created and legitimised around it. My intention is that this discussion can put exhibition at work as a set of mechanisms of display that, as the Foucauldian apparatus, bring visibility to some objects over others according to the power structures at play. And here, in the interplay between visibility and non-visibility, ‘exhibition’ starts reading asignifying affects and discourses left unspoken and unheard by the ‘exhibitionary apparatus’.

In this way, my proposal takes the term ‘exhibition’ as a distanced mode of reflection. Distanced in this context implies a latency that does not remain on the immediately recognisable traits of what is exhibited, but that instead pays attention to afterimages and remnants that are not necessarily registered by the process of showing. This is how ‘exhibition’ is deployed as part of the methodology. In this capacity, ‘exhibition’ is displaced from the systemic dynamics of exhibition-making into a broader and expanded arena of cultural phenomena. By performing the ‘exhibition’ away from its professional milieu, this dissertation recognises the potential of investigating the ‘exhibition’ in a broader framework that goes beyond the simple description of projects, peoples, exhibitions and artworks.

Exposures

This dissertation actualises the term ‘exhibition’ as ‘exposures’. If exhibitionary complex as a set of display mechanisms allows to recognise the conditions of production of what is sayable and visible and the uneven distribution of their signification; ‘exposures’ are the tensions and relations between ‘everything that

brought from all over the world and put on display during the Exposition Coloniale Internationele of 1931 in Paris. For further details about the International Colonial Exhibition read: Brigitta Kuster, “Sous les yeux vigilants / Under the Watchful Eyes. On the international colonial exhibition in Paris 1931”, [online] In: Tranversal, 05 2007, eipcp. [Assessed: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1007/kuster/en]

18 speaks’ and signifies, even if as mute speech and in a hidden visibility. Exposures are the mutuality of intentional and unintentional proximities and dialogues taking place in the system of meaning, including the meanings that fail to be recognised by systemic power structures. ‘Exposures’ are the ways in which registers (ideas, concepts, peoples, artefacts, affects) connect through continuous fluxes of intensities, which can be claimed to be recognised in latency.

This thesis sets up exposures as a speculative figure in order to rearticulate and actualise internalised modes of knowledge, recognising non-evidently connected material and affects (conceptual and practical) in a relational and horizontal (non- hierarchical) field of ‘exhibition’. In this way, it will be possible to propose three modalities of readership for barely recognised and registered logics beyond the representative order. These operations are: ‘non-event’, ‘sensing’ and ‘continuities’; which constitute alternative modalities of readership to discuss ‘exhibition’ outside the intentional gesture of setting something public.

Revolution

The revolutionary event is often seen as the de-activation of former institutions and actors, and their replacement with a new social and political order (Foucault, 1979). When the revolution takes hold, the end results become unknown. Not only because the revolution might fail, but also, because the political future in question still needs to be discussed between the actors involved; and the inclinations of the majority of the people is not known. And this is just to name a few of the contingent aspects taking part in the formulation of a revolution. Regardeless of the effectiveness of the emancipatory future of the revolution, the open-ended quality of the event turns it into an interesting intersection of highly visible exposures: people in the streets, a huge disclosure of the atrocious political mechanisms of oppression, and the advent of new interests in the formulation of the new political order.

This thesis builds on ‘revolution’ as an account of a highly significant occurrence that interrupts the course of history and claims novelty and emancipation (Marx, 2007; Arendt, 1990; Jay, 1993; Badiou, 2001, 2005). But the dissertation does not take this definition as finite. More than recognising revolution’s significance as a dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes and operations, I analyse the power relations that capture the potential ‘new’ of seeming declamatory and historical events.

The Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976) frames this investigation, and drives the interrogation of event as a repetition of the aesthetic appearance of the ‘new’ via discourse, enunciation and representation. More than the emancipation of the oppressed, these events are also the repetition of the aesthetics of novelty and emancipation, which silence latent and liminal affects taking place in the periphery of the major event. In this way, ‘exhibition’ is introduced as an epistemic tool able to level the demands and dramatization of the event in order to look at its stage, actors, and script and give a glimpse of the mechanisms of event- formation. Levelling the hierarchy claimed by the event sets up revolution in a non-hierarchical network of micro-events, which are rather dispersed and ambiguous.

Mapping the distribution of senses (the manifestation of event and its signification) and its aesthetics in the formulation of the ‘revolution’, this thesis proposes a reading beyond the ‘new’ order as emancipatory and novel. Although it happened forty years ago, I argue that the Portuguese Revolution does not take place in the past only. The revolution is also composed of differing and dispersed affects and asignifying logics that inhabit and constitute the readings and forms of being as readers of the revolution in the present.

I consider that the unexpected interruption of time enacted by the revolution is based on an aesthetic mechanism of production of novelty, which keeps affects muted and non-revolted. In order to gain access to these barely noticed elements, I propose to read the ‘exposures’ of the Portuguese Revolution. More than evaluating the efficacy of the revolution, this thesis delves into the conditions of

20 production of discourses and events in order to expand the space of representation of revolution as the institution of a novel order. Exposing the Event actualises revolution by stretching and twisting inside out the term, in order to enact other thoughts beyond its consensual and normative meaning (Rogoff, 2013).

The Curatorial

My investigations and questioning of normative definitions of ‘exhibition’ and ‘the museum’ started with a discomfort that emerged from my professional experience in the field of curating. Despite recognising and valuing the potential of curating as a speculative and investigative practice in the field of contemporary art and visual cultures, my experience in the field was marked by discouraging institutional constraints. The working conditions and the disciplinary demands, instead of fostering speculative research through the means of visual, aural and spatial practices, seem to be concerned about a set of professional tasks and activities not interested in activating the curatorial as an investigative practice.

Shifting from a minor to a major figure in the field of art exhibition over the course of the last fifteen years, the curator has become the professional in charge of a series of activities related to setting up an exhibition (or other exhibitionary formats, such as a book, performance, talk, screening) and creating its discourse, interpretation and contextualization. Although we can see the term ‘curator’ being used in the context of some International Exhibitions in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century6; it is only in the present day that the term has become ubiquitous, and is used to authoring a variety of displays in the contemporary art field. Either international biennials or local artist-run spaces, none discard the inclusion of curators as the authors and legitimisers.

Today, the ubiquitous ‘curator’ can be seen as a symptom of the ‘post- exhibitionary complex’, in which temporary exhibitions play an important role. I

6 In the colonial Exhibition of the Portuguese World (Exposição do Mundo Português) in Lisbon, 1940, Augusto de Castro and Sá e Melo are presented in the catalogue of the exhibition as ‘curators’ (Azevedo, 1982).

21 would like to pay some attention to the role of the temporary exhibition. Temporary exhibitions activate new understandings and readings around artwork’s conceptual and aesthetic propositions. Additionally, as noted by Bennett (1995), this endless ‘rehanging’ of artworks is not only driven by a genuine interest in new readings, but also as a way to respond to immediate needs—ideological, political and disciplinary. For example, the current interest in contemporary art practices from Africa and Latin America cannot be thought away from the framework of the spectres of new modalities of colonialism in contemporary art’s acquisitions and discourses. As framed by T. J. Demos (2013) the African and Latin American art mark a return to the postcolony effect. In other words, post-colonial relations continue to be played out in the formation of discourses conceived by former colonial powers.

How can the increasing number of temporary exhibitions and events taking place all across the world be understood? In the arena of contemporary art exhibitions and under the current neoliberalization of the cultural sector, temporary exhibitions necessarily serve new purposes. Whether in the form of a traditional exhibition, or in the form of one more un-missable event (performance, book launch, etc.), the increasing flux of openings, shows and events inevitably responds to a market-driven urge for spectacle and the need for a constant production of novelty (Debord, 1967).

I would like to argue that under the contemporary conditions of neoliberalism we see the capitalisation of the production of the ‘new’ via the proliferation of more and more spectacular exhibitions, raising attention and visibility to the ‘next new thing’. And still in line with the historically organised displays of the beginning of the public museums, curating is in charge of animating the genealogy of art history through new and refreshed juxtapositions. What is more, due to the curator’s specialization in the production of discourse through juxtaposition, this situation also helps to reiterate the disciplinary discourse and its inscription in art history books.

Without having to wait for the critics’ reviews in/on the following day/month/year in a specialized magazine, national newspaper or art history encyclopaedia, exhibition-making finds its own legitimiser even before the opening of the show, even before becoming public. Therefore, before the event takes place, the figure of the curator is already legitimising what will become public. One example is the media attention dedicated to the announcement of appointed curators of widely- acclaimed exhibitions (sometimes even years) before the opening of the exhibitionary event—for instance, Venice Biennial, Documenta and Manifesta, just to name a few.

It is not accurate to assume that international exhibitions and biennales are what restrain curators’ activities in the ‘post-exhibitionary complex’ condition. It is eventually true for a very minor number of curators. The rest and, moreover, the majority of curators are not spending their time working on new big exhibitions at all. Instead, they make themselves available to attend other people’s openings and seminars; to enrol in MFAs; to give a hand here and there; to write one application form after another; to be available to attend this and that residency; and to make themselves visible online through the wide range of social networks (Lorey, 2015).

The curator is also another prototype of a cognitarian worker in the port-fordist era. As part of the neoliberalisation of the cultural sector, curating ‘had led to massive activity, driven by an energy and enthusiasm for displays and events, much of which is less than fully considered.’ (Martinon and Rogoff, 2013, p. viii)

The spread of curatorial activities and their role in the capitalisation of exhibitions impose new demands on curating. Instead of affording the possibility to explore speculative investigations of new narratives across disciplines, the curator’s activity is captured by institutional bureaucracy, fund-raising applications, audience figures’ demands, institutional deadlines, discourse formation, neoliberal rhetorics of inclusion, networking, and the activity of gatekeeping of the spaces of representation of art history and contemporary art (Kafka, 2005).7

7 The short story ‘Before the Law’ by Franz Kafka tells the story of a man how wants to meet the law in person. He walks a long distance to meet the law and, when finally at the gate of the law premises, he is

In this highly uncertain and busy world of curating there is very little space left for reflexive speculation, experimentation and open ended investigation. Requirements for exhibitions and curatorial activities are confined by demographic demands, media attention, exhibition visibility, and neoliberal rhetorics of audiences’ participation and accessibility. Generally speaking, the curator is not called to contribute to the whole project as an implicated and critical practitioner. Most of the times, the curator is seen as a figure that can bring visibility, social and cultural capital, and legitimacy to a project that has been pre-defined from day one.

The neoliberalisation of curating in the field of contemporary art is seen, as the capture of cultural capital of the curator for the sake of visibility of the temporary shows (and other temporary formats: performances and talks). This phenomenon has directly impacted and constrained the investigative and open-ended possibilities of my own curatorial practices. In 2012 I was invited to curate an exhibition in Serralves Contemporary Art Museum in Porto, Portugal. Serralves Museum and the former bank BES (Banco Espírito Santo) annually organise a prize for young artists working with photography and moving image. An open call is nationally launched and the applications are later on selected by four appointed curators, of which one curates the show with the selected artists—my role in the edition of 2012. The short-listed artists are awared with the ‘opportunity’ to show in Serralves (in one of the most acclaimed institutions in Portugal) and seven thousand euros for the production of their artwork.

The invitation caught me by surprise. My previous projects were always concerned with fostering a process that, in one way or another, foregoes the idea of an end result right from the outset. As a practitioner I had previously been interested in

asked to wait because he cannot have access in that moment. The time passes and the man continues waiting for his chance to meet the law. Before dying, the man asks how come he was the only person during all those years to ask for admittance. The gate keeper reveals the truth: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.” With this parable Kafka points out the fact that the limits of the possible are kept by those who perpetuate them by sitting in front of possibility’s gate, more than external forces that are yet to be discovered. (Kafka, 2005)

24 thinking about the mechanisms of showing within the exhibitionary conditions (disciplines, spaces and apparatus of exhibition) and how they frame my practice. In this way, often times my projects most of the times attempt to create a physical and conceptual platform for discussion and to think around thematics that can reflect upon the given situation.

Before accepting the invitation I had some doubts about the suitability of the project to my modus operandi. I felt like the format problematically did not accommodate for a curatorial project beyond the organisation of artworks in the exhibition space. Instead, my practice was marked by an interest in the conditions of production of displays both conceptual and formally. After expressing my concerns to Portuguese curator Ricardo Nicolau, the person in charge for the project in Serralves Museum, I was deeply encouraged to accept the invitation. Ricardo Nicolau told me that the institution was in fact looking forward to collaborating with curators that could bring new approaches to the institution. After being given the guarantee of openness, I accepted the invitation to take part in the jury, curate the show and coordinate the publication.

Given the format of the prize (open call, jury, chosen proposals, final exhibition and publication), I approached the curatorial project as an intervention that could run alongside the other art projects defined right from the outset. The role of the curator would not be limited to setting-up the layout of the show or providing an over-arching explanation for the works. Instead, my proposal set up an investigative process based on discussions and literature shared with the short- listed artists. That was a possibility to discuss each other’s projects and eventually advance changes to the submitted proposals in the occasion of the open call. Additionally, I also proposed to explore the role/activity of the curator this particular exhibition-format (i.e., exhibition layout, catalogue text, wall-text, press-conference, guided tour to funding bodies) as an opportunity to open the discussion to the artists involved.

One of the main points of the whole discussion was unfair and illegal payment conditions provided by the institution. Short-listed artists are rewarded with seven

25 thousand euros for the production of their piece. But in order to use the money the institution obliges each artist to issue an invoice as a self-employed worker. In Portugal, issuing a self-employed worker invoice compels the payment of taxes and health insurance (it represents up to 45% of the total amount) as if they were providing a service to the Museum. Since the artists are not providing a service but are being rewarded with an amount that allows them to produce their piece for the show, the Museum is incurring in an illegal procedure. Moreover, since the money is supposed to be spent for the production, artists pay taxes twice. Goods is always already subject to value added tax (VAT 23%). There are legal alternatives to the self-employed invoice for these kinds of situations, but the Museum did in fact, not want to contemplate them. The museum argues for continuity; they have always worked in this way and never found this way of working as constituting any problem.

My proposal consisted in bringing artists to discuss questions related to the funding of the cultural sector, the intervention of big private companies as funding-bodies and the consequent and ever-increasing precarisation of cultural workers—i.e.: myself and the artists involved in that particular situation. Additionally, I proposed to share my space in the catalogue (curator’s text) with two other authors. First, a newly commissioned work by Portuguese artist Marco Mendes which intersects current issues about means of production, corporations’ financial interests, and the subsequent precarisation of labour in the cultural sector. Second, the catalogue would also include the translation from English to Portuguese of Jan Verwoert’s text ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’ (2012). The text addresses the collective ‘we’ of the professionals of the cultural sector and examines the reasons why, despite the precarious conditions, ‘we’ keep responding to the demands of the sector.

Despite the institution’s initial optimism towards providing space for ‘new’ curatorial projects, my proposals were received with suspicion. The institution not only tried to persuade me to give up, but also censored Marco Mende’s commission—which in the end was not published in the catalogue as previously

26 planned.8 The institution argued that the curatorial project was inadequate for the purpose of the show, which according to the organisers’ argument, was to give visibility to the nominated artists only.

As the Serralves Museum’s curator told me at some point during the process: I was invited to curate and that is on what I should focus. Reading between the lines he was not only accusing me of failing to deliver but, moreover, he was defining curating as the expected performance of pre-determined professional tasks. These tasks usually are framed by: setting up the layout of the exhibition, talking to the artists about their work and writing a text about the show that is comprehensible to a wide range of audiences.

The concerns about the consensus around the role of the curator have led to a productive discussion on ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’. Over the past few years, this discussion has become more prominent in the field of contemporary art theory and visual cultures (Lind, 2010; O’Neill, 2012; Smith, 2012; Martinon, 2013). Much of the current debate revolves around setting up a realm of activity and thought for the curatorial beyond mere delivery of professional practices within the field of contemporary art display. In this debate it is claimed that ‘curating’ stands for a set of professional practices concerning the production of the exhibitionary; whereas, the ‘curatorial’ recognises further activities in the cultural field, where it ‘seeks novel ways of instigating the crises of our world in other modalities, of finding other ways to engage with our current woes.’ (Martinon and Rogoff, 2013, p. viii) In other words, the curatorial claims for itself a process of continuous investigation, across disciplines, engaging with urgent cultural, political and social issues.

More than looking for better practices and more critical practitioners, ‘the curatorial’ interrupts the vertiginous process of spectacle production and takes a step aside to ask: ‘what it is that is really taking place underneath all this glitter?’ (Martinon and Rogoff, 2013, p. ix) The curatorial practice resists letting go of the

8 To see Marco Mendes’ commissioned work please see Appendices (pp. 239-40).

27 investigative potential of curating as a process of experimental assemblage of ideas and objects. This mode of investigative practice recognises ‘curating’: as an event of knowledge production; as a commitment to publicness as seeing, reading and speaking; and the curatorial as a practice that experiments with epistemological tools that engage with the urgent problematics that constitute our social, cultural and political milieu (Martinon and Rogoff, 2013).

So where should the space for the speculative and investigative practice of curating be found, within the contemporary conditions of neoliberalism? According to Martinon and Rogoff in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (2013):

If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: its enactment, dramatization and performance. (2013, p. ix [my emphasis])

The curatorial, then, is not the practice of exhibition-making that reiterates and reinforces totalising and hegemonic narratives of art history, art works, and the contemporary. Rather, it is precisely that which disturbs the continuous replication of old disciplinary structures by looking elsewhere. If curating sets up the stage; the curatorial breaks it down by engaging with urgent issues and cultural material without explaining and contextualizing them according to particular discourses, disciplines, fields of knowledge or ideologies.

Methodologically, the curatorial practice interrupts and crosses disciplines, rather than adhering to and reinforcing institutional limits and boundaries. A totalizing and disciplinary narrative is replaced by the constant redistribution of narrative

28 components produced ‘in the encounter with the other and/or with objects (on display, for example).’ (Martinon, 2013, p. 5) And this encounter happens in the involvement of all the components, where the practitioner is also included and implicated. In this way, the curatorial is also the practice of the rearticulation of one’s own embodied assumptions and internalised knowledge as an implicated subject.

In conclusion, it is fundamental to say that an attempt to put forward a definition of the curatorial would contradict what this term alludes to. In the same way, here, in my dissertation, I do not aim to either fully define the curatorial, or to map its respective good practices. Instead, I draw on the curatorial as a continuous and unbounded practice of investigation and rearticulation of thought in the intersection between practices, ideas, concepts, and affects.

Aesthetics

The use of the term ‘aesthetics’ does not intend to suggest a set of principles whereby art theory organises sensibility, taste, and pleasure in the arts. In this thesis, aesthetics stand beyond art practice and encompasses the multiplicity of forms in which the visible, the audible, the doable and the thinkable constitute experience and perception of what happens. (Rancière, 2006) The configuration of experience is constituted by modes of sense perception and subjectivization, which, in turn, are organised by the aesthetic-political field of possibilities.

If aesthetics are the forms of the field of possibilities—of what can be said, seen, thought, heard, done—it is also where power structures intersect to regulate and coordinate the separations between those who take part and those who are excluded from this re-distribution. The distribution of the sensible is, therefore, dependent on a situated power structure that divide those who are able to speak, and those that remain unheard or silenced. My thesis looks at the aesthetic manifestations of the new, through Torre Bela, Conackry and Horse Money, in order to provoke yet unlived experiences of the grammar of the new. In other

29 words, juxtaposing and investigating these materials will allow to look through the aesthetic forms of the new, and their also contained (but silenced) an-aesthetics— what is kept away from the sensible.

Driving Questions

Despite the literature and practice-based responses to the ‘exhibitionary complex’, neoliberalisation of the cultural sector, and the epistemological crisis of curating presented above, there is insufficient research on the conceptual potentialities of ‘exhibition’ beyond the ‘exhibitionary complex’ or public display. The present thesis addresses the conceptual qualities of ‘exhibition’ as ‘the relations between events’ or ‘exhibitionary occurrences’ taking place in the expanded field of cultural activities and where discourses, representation and enunciation are produced and reiterated. Addressing events as highly visible occurrences where ideas, concepts, peoples, artefacts are set into exposure, I advance that ‘exhibition’ produces a new arena of thought and interrogation to address barely visible and noticeable occurrences taking place during highly declamatory events.

The driving questions of this project are of two different levels of approach. The first set of questions addresses the possibility of animating the curatorial beyond curating and exhibition-making, by activating the curatorial as an investigative and speculative practice. The second set of questions is concerned with mechanisms of appearance, visibility and enunciation taking place in the expanded field of human affairs, such as revolutions. The set of questions propose epistemic tools to read barely recognised instances, affects and enunciations taking place in a revolutionary process.

I address the following questions:

- How can the curatorial, as an investigative practice, be activated beyond the professional practices of curating and the constraints set up by the neo-liberalisation of the cultural sector?

- How can the curatorial be displaced beyond the confines of exhibitionary formats towards a continuous, speculative and investigative practice operating in the expanded field of cultural activities?

These questions operate as conceptual driving forces that instigate and animate the research around the expanded field of the exhibitionary. They serve to mobilise a set of concerns regarding event, discourse and representation that are also present in public displays and historical events. The second set of questions encompasses the actualisation of conceptual qualities and potentialities of ‘exhibition’ to address barely signifying instances silenced and dismissed in exhibitionary events, like revolutions. The second set of questions is:

- How can an analysis of the mechanisms of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ provide a glimpse of ‘event’, ‘representation’ and ‘discourse’ formation in the expanded field of cultural phenomena? - How can ‘exhibition’ allow to look beyond the major exhibitionary event and open up a broader field of signification and resonances? - What is being disrupted by the ‘exhibitionary complexities’ during the historical event? - How can the epistemic tools of the ‘non-event’, the ‘sensing’ and the ‘continuities’ open up to non-narrativised and non-hierarchical affects present in social, cultural and political phenomena?

This set of questions investigates the mechanisms that govern displays, be it either an exhibition, an event or a revolution. These questions also activate the field of the ‘exhibitionary’ as a more complex space of interaction, which is able to register unseen, unheard and as-yet-unthought dithering of significations (Rose, 2003). This thesis animates exhibitionary dynamics in the context of a historical event: the Portuguese Revolution. Interrogating this event aims to provoke accesses to the mechanisms that govern what is in ‘exposure’, and an oblique view to knowing

31 barely recognisable instances taking place during the exhibitionary event. (Clough and Halley, 2007; Gil, 2007)

Methodology and Chapters Outline

The present project addresses the questions outlined above through a range of methods which stem out of my previous practice and experience of work in curating and contemporary art exhibitions. Such experience led to a review of literature about exhibition and museum studies, from the seventies to the present day (O’Doherty, 1976; Crimp, 1993; Bennett, 1995; Lidchi, 2013; Dewdney, Dibosa, Walsh, 2013). Subsequently, these questions led to an inquiry on contemporary debates on curating and the curatorial (Lind, 2010; O’Neill, 2012; Smith, 2012; Martinon, 2013). The close reading of these sources helped identify the components of the ‘exhibitionary complex;’ the power relations orchestrating these forms of display and its ideological purposes; and, think about the exhibition, as mode of critical inquiry, beyond exhibition making.

In order to explore the epistemic potentialities of ‘exhibition’ beyond ‘exhibition- making’, I investigate intersections between three previously non-related fields of research: 1) political historical legacies, 2) exhibitionary complexities and 3) the cinematographic apparatuses. The intersections in question will be activated by a close look at sequences and outtakes of the documentary film Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977) set in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution. Additionally, in the third chapter two other films are introduced. The first being an essay-film directed by Portuguese artist Filipa César in 2013, titled Conakry; the second being Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro), the latest film directed by Portuguese director Pedro Costa (2014).

The three films (Torre Bela, Conakry and Horse Money) operate as methodological drives, which set up the stage of the ‘field of exposures’ of the revolution in the past and in the present, from where the official narrative can be actualised. The films provide the aesthetic material (i.e., the visible, sayable and thinkable of

32 revolution) that can problematise political historical legacies, exhibition complexities and discourse formation. Instead of operating as an artefact—that is assessed and investigated within its study boundaries—the film enables entry points to the conditions of the formation of event as the time and space of the new, and its silent affects.

Assessing the mechanisms of display in Torre Bela (as the documentation of an event), Grada Kilomba’s performance in Conakry, and Ventura’s traumatic memories of the revolution in Horse Money, I argue for a modality of readership that provokes the ‘as-yet-unlived, still-shaping’ occurrences of the aesthetic material (Rose, 2014, p. 67). I do not look for what the films do not tell, but what the material, partially and tentatively, foresees and provokes in the post- revolutionary political, social and cultural situation of the country.

These films do not examine what Harlan failed to cover, Grada’s speech truthfulness, or Ventura’s historical blindspots. Instead the reading strategies implemented in the three chapters unsettle normative discourses and propose epistemic tools to read silenced and forcefully hidden gazes. In doing so, the proposed tools (‘non-event’, ‘sensing’, ‘continuities’) seek out elements that although quasi-elusive, still illuminate our times and the historical legacy of the Portuguese Revolution in the present (Benjamin, 2007).

My methodological approach is inspired by Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said’s text Freud and the Non-European (2014). In this text, Said provides a reading and response to Freud’s convoluted and partial relationship to his own Jewishness elaborated in Moses and Monotheism (1967). Said does not point out what Freud failed to see or denied to write. Instead, Freud’s analysis is the plateau upon which Said builds a model of identity for our times that is partial, fragmented and complex. In evoking Said’s text, I make a modest attempt to seize hold of elements provoked by the film when set in exposure to myself (i.e. my assumptions, affects and readership). To quote Walter Bejamin, I take Said’s methodology to seize hold of a memory that ‘threatens to disappear irretrievably.’ (Benjamin, 2007, p. 257) The memory that threatens to disappear is formulated in the ‘as-yet-unlived, still-

33 shaping’ flashes of the past into the present that I now take as my methodological drive to actualise the meaning of revolution in the present. (Rose, 2014, p. 67)

Suspending the Event’s Disruption—The ‘Non-Event’ in Torre Bela

Chapter One develops a reading of Torre Bela through the re-working of the notion of event. By analysing the unfolding of the events in Torre Bela and in particular, by making use of the scene of the occupation of the mansion house, the first chapter deploys a shift from the notion of historical event to the one of the ‘non-event’. The shift is arranged as a way to look at the production of the event beyond what is being shown within the frame of the documentation. The cinematic apparatus and the presence of the filmmaker are included in ‘contingent’ elements that constitute the broader stage of the event—including what is seen and what is not seen, or the ‘before- and the ‘behind-the-camera’.

Smothering the difference between the ‘before- and the ‘behind-the-camera’ in regards to the production of the event aims to include new spaces, interventions and actors; at the same time that it also allows to find barely recognisable instances that complicate the event as a one-off and emancipatory occasion. To the micro-instances that are finally contemplated and exceed the signification of the revolutionary occupation in Torre Bela, I call ‘underflows’. From a linguistic perspective, ‘underflows’ encompasses the surplus of signifiers uncaptured by the signified. The ‘underflows’ of the event exceed the political agenda of the revolution and remain in mute resonance in the underlevels of the signifying system.

Contrary to a canonical and overly-codified and signifying revolution, the notion of the ‘non-event’ allows us to look at occurrences that happen within a more complex network of instances where hierarchical event mechanisms are rendered inoperative. The figure of the ‘non-event’ proposes eroding event’s hierarchy, expanding the network of components taking place before/during/after the event, and engaging with interstitial occurrences that are barely recognised by the

34 emancipatory event. The ‘non-event’ is not necessarily a corrective notion; it is not meant to signal what the director of Torre Bela, Thomas Harlan, failed to see or tell either. This notion aims instead to chart a ‘taking of space’ in the theoretical dialogue, which allows for the emergence of absent narratives and surplus enunciations.

Wilson’s Dream of Becoming an Actor and the ‘Exhibitionary Complex’ in Torre Bela

Chapter Two looks at modalities of representation at play in the documentary film Torre Bela. Here the chapter takes a close look at the dramatic means of representation orchestrated by Harlan, and the visual devices and tropes used to give the impression that reality was taking place before the camera—direct sound, long shots, aerial views, non-signifiers of the presence of the filmmaker and film crew. I argue that Harlan’s gaze behind the camera not only projects a scripted image of the revolutionary event, but also fosters people’s engagement and dramatisation of the scenes. Torre Bela needs to be read neither as a documentary, nor as a militant film. As Jean Baudrillar would pose it, Torre Bela’s genre is rather a symptom of the loss of the real during fascism and the intent to recuperate the images and realism of the present. (Baudrillard, 1994)

However, Harlan’s directions offer only one layer of access to the scripted representation of the dramatic event. A family member of the former workers of Torre Bela gained a great emphasis during the making of the film, and consequently, in its current memories. Wilson Filipe was an emblematic squatter that Harlan decided to select as the main character of his film. What Harlan did not know back than was that Wilson saw in the presence of the filmmaker in Torre Bela an opportunity to pursuit his dream of being a famous actor in Europe. Acknowledging Wilson’s secret dream undermined the seeming one-way manipulation of Harlan in the film. It is by over dramatising the event that Wilson returns the latter’s intention for a spectacular event—arguably, more than a

35 revolutionary one. In Wilson’s secret return of the gaze, I argue that the squatter becomes the unrepresentable subjectivity of the Portuguese Revolution.

The figure of Wilson is the entry point to the investigation of the means of representation present in Torre Bela’s estate, or better said, ‘stage’. The arena of representation of a real event is not only forged by the gaze of the film’s crew, but also by the ‘return of the gaze’ of the rural workers, who consciously overdramatise their own lives in front of the cinematic apparatus. To look at the interplay of gazes in the film is also to expand the field of elements in exposure and resonance during the making of the event. Here the notion of ‘exhibitionary complex’ devised by Tony Bennett (1995) is critically interrogated in order to propose the expansion of the field of exposures to those that are turned invisible by the visual apparatus (the mechanical eye of the camera).

I conclude that to read the unrepresentable affects and subjectivities taking place in the Portuguese Revolution we need another reading model. Drawing on Nancy’s notion of ‘sensing’ the intangibility and yet undoubtable presence of the secret desire of Wilson disturbs the seeming totalizing access of Harlan to the occupation. By critically interrogating accessibility to the object of knowledge, I argue that ‘access’ implies the existence of an object’s truthfulness and inner core that can be set in entered. Instead, ‘sensing’ recognises the fluxes of intensities between exposures and their mutuality that come about through affects and obscure resonances during and after the revolutionary occupation.

Actualising Revolution—The Non-Revolting Affects And ‘Continuities’ Of The Portuguese Revolution

Chapter Three closes the series of curatorial forays where the intersection between the field of exposures and the Portuguese historical aesthetics produce alternative tools to read barely recognised instances. Although Chapter Three leaves the materiality of the film Torre Bela, it does not overcome the problematics provoked by the staged event. It is by interrogating how the mechanisms of revolution

36 making can actualise its signification in the present that the Third Chapter looks at the ‘continuities’ of revolution. Here ‘continuities’ are the set of affects that remain un-revolted in the aftermath of the revolutionary process.

Drawing on Hanna Arendt’s notes on revolution, this chapter delves into the types of violence present in an upheaval. There is objective violence (direct inflicted violence) and symbolic violence (the disruption of the old order and the emergence of the new beginning). However, in both cases violences are located in the confrontation between opponents, for instance, dictatorship vs. socialism, oppressors vs. liberators, and old order vs. new order. These binaries timidly address other types of violences, since for instance the designation ‘oppressed’—in the West, meaning ‘white working class’—fails to acknowledge the plurality of subjects troubled in the aftermath of the revolution.

Contrary to objective and symbolic violence, affective violence argues for a different oppression inflected by the former oppressed, now the white, male, revolutionary subject. In the process of claiming revolution as the liberation of the oppressed the new emancipatory subject fails to capture the multiplicity of subjectivities undergoing other processes of oppression, i.e., colonialism, racism, white supremacy. In this way, the overidentification and singularisation of the burdened silence subjectivities, discourses and enunciations under the process of the emancipatory revolt are kept untouched (away from emancipation). The films Conakry (2013) and Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014) introduce the affects and enunciations of the presences left unheard and subaltern in post- revolutionary Portugal.

Drawing on Pedro Costa’s body of work, with a great emphasis on his latest film, I argue for a curatorial investigative practice based on ‘insistence’ and ‘repetition’. These epistemic tools aim to investigate the silenced continuities of oppression that fail to revolt during the revolution and are further oppressed by the new revolutionary subject. In silence, ‘continuities’ repeat themselves over time with no evental interruption.

The term ‘continuities’ aims to circumscribe the hidden presence of Ventura (collaborator of Pedro Costa and actor in his films), the mute speeches (and images) of Amílcar Cabral in Conakry, and the contradictions of revolutionary claims. In this way, avoiding the lures of novelty and recognising non-theorised significations, the curatorial investigation produces an actualised, but not conclusive, reading of the Portuguese Revolution. Therefore, I argue that the Carnation Revolution is not an event that occurred in the past, but is an ever- shaping process of erasures and forced silences taking place and framing in the present.

This dissertation fosters an investigative practice to reflect upon crystallised notions of the Portuguese Revolution and discloses silenced and asignifying affects in the present. Driven by a set of concerns that emerge from curatorial practice, the films presented in this dissertation operate as vehicles that bring previous unconnected elements together in order to investigate the motifs of: exhibition, event, discourse and representation framed within the Portuguese Revolution.

In the next three chapters the term ‘exhibition’ (event, juxtaposition, discourse, reception, representation) helps to foster new ways of seeing, reading and speaking in/nearby/about/to events taking place in a broader realm of cultural activities (Rancière, 2006; Nancy, 1998; Minh-Ha, 1991). In this way, this thesis finds its ground not in the disciplinary constraints of exhibition-making, but in the conditions and possibilities of ‘exhibition’ as an epistemic and theoretical tool for the curatorial as an investigative practice in order to tackle contemporary urgencies.

So I had some knowledge, I spoke creole, I had been in the homeland [the Cape Verde Islands], and I was with the immigrants in Lisbon. I was a bit afraid because I was not part of that world. I don’t even belong to their class. So the first film I directed in Fontaínhas is still a film that ‘comes and goes’, so to speak. What I mean is that the characters go to the neighbourhood and then leave to the centre of the city. I still needed the city, my white city. What I have done was to do what everybody does. In short, I picked up a cliché—something I read in the paper and worked around to turn it in a film called Ossos (Bones). Despite being shot in the Fontaínhas, I would not say it is done ‘with the people’ and ‘in that place’.

For that occasion I still brought the machines [cinematic apparatus]. Let’s say that I brought cinema there. I thought I could do that. So I had everything: the trucks, the lights, the assistance and the producer. And after all that it didn’t work. I mean I tried. I like the film but from what I remember, it is the feeling that every filmmaker knows, sadly. You look at the scene about to be shot and there is nothing there. Everything is seemingly in the right place. Everything is ready according to the script. And all of a sudden, the ‘thing’ is not in what the apparatus is recording. Everything good is elsewhere: here, here, here [Pedro Costa points at different places around him]. It is a shame. You don’t know what to do. You panic in front of your actors. And all of a sudden there is a ray of sun on a flower next to you that is precisely what you want to shoot. But you cannot do it. Moving this machine [trucks, lighting, etc.] to capture the ray of sun is impossible. I don’t know how many million dollars or patience you would need to do that. Moreover, the film crew is bored. They are essentially bored all the time. And they get really angry when you suddenly want to change the whole machinery. I still think that film, and film crews, and the essence of film, they long for novelty. They seek something different.

9 Passage of transcribed interview and Q&A with Pedro Costa conducted by Laura Mulvey for the première of Horse Money in London, ICA, 18th September, 2015.

CHAPTER ONE

Suspending the Event’s Disruption—the ‘Non-Event’ in Torre Bela

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one. (Montaigne, 2006, n.p. [my emphasis])

Introduction

It is worth recalling that an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable. (Derrida, 2007, p. 441)

The term ‘event’ is used to stress the importance of a past, present or future happening. In doing so, the ‘event’, whether it is a historical or a personal one, escapes the normative quotidian and is inscribed as a phenomenon that exceeds previous orders—social, political, cultural and affective. It claims to bring a novelty, an interruption, and something new. It has such importance in comparison to other smaller occurrences—most of which are barely noticed—that

41 calling it ‘event’ is already a way to make it stand out from the chaotic constellation of other normalcies that occur simultaneously.

Grounded on visual material, historical narratives and the mechanisms of event production, the tension between the ‘writing of history’ and the ‘production of the new’ is at the core of the first chapter of this dissertation. This chapter looks at the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976), specifically at the documentary film Torre Bela (1977) shot in 1975 during the PREC (Ongoing Revolutionary Process or Período Revolucionário em Curso), to explore how the claim for an extraordinary event overlaps with previous forms of writing the event and making it significant. Although the event claims to bring something new to the set of relations already in place; in order to signify as novelty it also repeats the aesthetic forms which appear as new. By aesthetic forms I mean the ways in which the event is (re)presented, acting as manifestations of experience formalised in language, images, affects and thoughts. (Rancière, 2006)

The disruption comes about in forms that tend to be called revolutions, natural cataclysms, scientific discoveries, artistic originality, and love affairs (Badiou, 2001).10 For French philosopher Alain Badiou (2001), the event is a break not only in time, but, primarily a break in the ‘being-subject’. Events inscribe the subject beyond its given conditions; they open up to a new set of possibilities. Badiou’s ‘event’ rescues us from the ‘ordinary inscription of ‘what there is’, or the banality of what we are as humans (Badiou, 2001, p. 41). The philosopher argues that before the event, we are mere subjects and it is only through the truth-process held by the event that the subject transcends itself onto another level of existence which he calls ‘being’. The emergence of ‘being’ is driven by the excess of experience that overflows the previous order. In Badiou’s words:

10 US American philosopher Clayton Crocket (2013) writing on the genealogy of the notion of the event in philosophical tradition identified its first appearance in the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger under the term ereignis, meaning ‘event of appropriation,’ developed in Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger, 2012). According to Crocket in Deleuze Beyond Badiou (2013), the shift to the language of the event represents, on the one hand, a retrieval of Heidegger, and on the other hand, a deployment of this term in the very different context of French post-structuralism and in particular in the work of Alain Badiou (2001, 2005) and Gilles Deleuze (2006).

Let us say that a subject, which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation [support]) needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’. Let us call this supplement an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new way of being. Such events are well and truly attested: the French Revolution in 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style. But also: the Cultural Revolution in China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg. (Badiou, 2001, p. 41)

According to Badiou’s formulation, an event is not something ordinary and simple that happens within the quotidian. The event is instead that which is produced out of unforeseen circumstances, and is therefore dramatic, declamatory and powerful. The discipline of history makes use of the logic of interruption to make sense of the transformations that occur over time, which arguably explain the socio-political conditions and turns of each era. Historical materialism is also grounded on the principle that the struggle of the oppressed working class against the ruling class leads to a radical transformation able to set up a new set of societal conditions implemented by the proletariat.

One could continue adding remarkable events to the list of historical deeds proposed by Badiou; either by mapping an event’s cultural significance, political breaks, personal achievements, or by acknowledging contributions to physics, maths, and to other fields of knowledge production. The list would certainly be endless. But the question here is not about how to recognise and foresee events, and whether or not events are remarkable and should be recalled in historical narratives. Rather, my research aims to look at the mechanisms of event production as an activation of the system of meaning of event, dependent on

43 power structures able to turn it into a cultural phenomenon—and, ultimately, unquestionable truth.

The ambition of Badiou to universalise the notion of event permits a look at some of event’s mechanisms within an Eurocentric vision. For instance, in the case of the ‘French Revolution of 1792’, it can be considered of great importance for the recognition of the rights of the French citizens; but its significance should not overwrite its restrictions, including, ignoring the plurality of subjects not encompassed by this transformation. By claiming a singular political identity with ‘being’, Badiou forgets about the multiplicity of political subjectivities and identity under oppressive regimes. Claiming the universal significance of the French Revolution does not recognise its contemporaneity with colonial France, where the colonised peoples were not even considered subjects by the colonised power— the citizens of France. Not to refer to women and the less privileged to whom ‘les droits de l’homme’ did not apply.

Another aspect that drives these preoccupations, and that runs in the backdrop of my reading of the event are the ways in which the ‘new’ and its spectacular appearance have been capitalised in contemporary culture. The fact that events resonate with the emergence of new, remarkable, and spectacular occasions, makes the term ‘event’ more and more appealing to publicity campaigns, contemporary art shows, and many other cultural phenomena. Claiming for what I call in this thesis, the ‘evental new’ is highlighting the importance and urgency of the moment, its exception to the ordinary; and, therefore, raising a special attention towards it.

However, since ‘new’ is not an absolute term, it needs to be thought of as a historical and situated interpretation—as that which is subject to change over the course of time. As French philosopher Michel Foucault writes in the introduction to Archaeology of Knowledge: ‘(…) how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation)?’ (Foucault, 2002a, p. 6) Discontinuities are learnt as a language. They also obey to a system that allows us to identify those manifestations. A very

44 simple example of the aesthetics of change is the organisation of historical narrative in decades and centuries, as if there was a consistent break every ten or hundred years.

French philosopher Michel Foucault (2005a) analyses systems of thought and knowledge in social sciences (epistemology and language) and the way in which they govern systems of conceptual possibilities that are, sometimes, unconsciously perpetuated by individuals in particular domains and periods. More than recognising what can be achieved with this formula, Foucault investigates the epistemic foundations of what can be ‘thought’ and ‘said’ under each regime. The ‘thought’ and the ‘said’ are governed by structures of power in place to serve hegemonic political and cultural projects, e.g., modernity. As Foucault asserts, the governance of disciplines’ discourse in social sciences orchestrates the binary between normativity and disruptions:

(…) the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, montionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events. (Foucault, 2002a, p. 1 [my emphasis])

Interruptions are situated formulations whose status and nature vary considerably—for instance, the Eurocentric reading of the importance of the French Revolution as a foundational historical event—it is fundamental to understand how discontinuity is conceived through aesthetic forms. In other words, aesthetics forms are the manifestations of the doable, sayable and thinkable that ‘define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of the bodies’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 39), which in this case assess the possibilities of novelty and emancipatory potential of the event.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière elaborated extensively on aesthetics. The philosopher proposes aesthetics not as a theory of ‘sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs’, but as the ways in which we configure experience and modes of

45 senses (Rancière, 2004, p. 22). Aesthetics are ways of doing and making related to art practice but not exclusively. They are also the relationships the ways of doing and making maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility; which frame, at the same time, the realm of the possibilities of what can be said, thought and seen. These instances are the senses and the forms that animate the distribution of the sensible forms (language, painting, politics, etc.), which change over time and are organised under, what Rancière calls, regimes. In this way, the aesthetic regimes intervene and feedback to the general distribution of the senses (Rancière, 2004, p. 13).

Following Rancière’s thoughts, the configuration of an event as new runs in a regime that allows it to become ‘thinkable, visible and sayable’; i.e., made sensible under the tradition of what is already recognised as the ‘new’. To look at visual, aural and discursive manifestations of the Portuguese Revolution proposes a reading of the mechanisms that write the revolutionary event on its making. I argue that to have access to the formation of the novelty and its regimes of signification (through language, thoughts, or images) is to grasp the mechanisms that control the conditions of formation of the revolution imagery and discourse.

To assess the ‘tradition of the new’ is to enable a glimpse of the jettisoned events operating in the sublevels of the revolution. Considering that the term event do not recognise the continuities or repetitions of the previous order, claiming a new beginning, it overshadows contemporary discourses and less-declamatory occurrences. It is in the ‘underlevels’—subterranean layers—of the event that one can grasp what Foucault calls: the ‘unmoving histories’ (2002a, p. 4). According to this philosopher, there are histories and/or stories that remain untouched by the event and go unnoticed. Nevertheless, the ‘unmoving histories’ do not disappear despite unnoticed. They are left in the darkness of visibility and in the silence of enunciation.

I believe that one can suspend the event’s rhetorics as a way to access what is being effaced by the declamatory claims of radical transformation; that one can look at how an event is formed. In revealing the underlying tendencies silenced by

46 political, social and cultural constructions, and power structures, we can locate which types of power define the interpretation of an ‘event’ as the emergence of the new, and which elements that, despite taking part in the event, become dismissed or silenced in this process of emergence.

After introducing some of the conceptual questions around the enunciation of event, the following sections expand the network of ‘exposures’ and the distribution of the sensible taking place in the making and interpretation of the event. More specifically, the core of the argument articulates insights into the exposures and relations that are barely recognised by the ‘evental new’, despite the exposures and their relations overlapping in time and exclusion, with the event formation. This analysis serves as a means to enter into the complex network of micro-events (the invisible ones that do not claim for attention) within the ‘new event’, in order to touch upon intensities hidden by the event’s signifying apparatus.

Event: The Portuguese Carnation Revolution

From a physics point of view, chaos would be a universal giddiness, the sum of all possible perceptions being infinitesimal or infinitely minute; but the screen would extract differentials that could be integrated in ordered perceptions. If chaos does not exist, it is because it is merely the bottom side of the great screen, and because the latter composes infinite series of wholes and parts, which appear chaotic to us (as aleatory developments) only because we are incapable of following them, or because of the insufficiency of our own screens. (Deleuze, 1993, p. 77)

In order to analyse the ‘event’ it is important to ground the discussion on one of its phenomena: the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 197411, the only socialist revolution to take place in central and western Europe in the twentieth century. The Portuguese Revolution took place on the 25 April 1974 and overthrew more than forty years of a dictatorial regime. Before the revolution António Oliveira Salazar ruled the country until 1968, being followed by Marcelo Caetano up until the burst of the revolution. The new order of 1974 was founded on the basis of the programme of the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas— MFA) until 1976. During this transition, the National Salvation Junta governed the country until the first provisional government took power on the 16th of May of the same year.

After the Portuguese people had been deprived of fundamental rights during Salazar’s dictatorial regime—for instance, freedom of speech, elections, popular participation in politics, education, class mobility, free press, political opposition to the regime—the country went through a two-year period (1974-1976) of intense transformation. This period was characterised by political instability (failed attempts of right-wing coups12 and several attacks to regional branches of the Communist Party) and the building of the foundations of a national socialist project. Despite the great support of the left-wing faction of the Armed Forces Movement, the military became internally divided by ideological differences that would start shaping of what can be clearly read nowadays as the birth of a neoliberal system that still marks the current political scenario (Almeida and Freire, 2002).

In the middle of the uproar and motivated by the transformations taking place in all sectors of Portuguese society, from the cities to the rural, people took matters

11 The historical event of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution is taken up in the scope of this dissertation as a way to investigate the mechanisms of event production. The reading strategy implemented is neither meant to analyse the revolution historically, nor to rewrite its significance and narrative. It is rather an entry point to its mechanisms of production, evaluation and interpretation. 12 For instance, the one led by General António Spinola on the 28th of September, 1974. General António Spínola was a Portuguese military and Governor of the Portuguese Guinea between 1968 and 1973. In 1974, after the revolution, he took on the role of President of the Salvation Junta until August. The short stay in power was due to his conservative ideas for the country, not in line with the majority members of the MFA (Movement of the Armed Forces) who fought for a Socialist country (Mattoso, 1998).

48 into their own hands. For instance, everyday people took it upon themselves to work with architects and build social housing neighbourhoods to revitalise troubled areas. SAAL, or Local Ambulatory Support Service (Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local) was designed and implemented by the Portuguese architect, urban planner and critic Nuno Portas between 1974 and 1976. As Secretary of State for Housing after the 1974 revolution, Portas set up technical teams led by architects who, in collaboration with the local population, tried to address the urgent housing needs of communities across the nation (Bandeirinha, 2007).

Effected by the government, the PREC (Período Revolutionário em Curso or, in English, Ongoing Revolutionary Process) was a two-year process from the Carnation Revolution up until the draft of the new constitution in April 1976 planned for the taking place of structured transformations to lead the country into a stable democracy. One of the crucial aims of PREC was the implementation of the land reform to better distribute the land between the people. During the dictatorship, the land ownership was still designed according to a feudalist system, therefore, in the hands of very few, i.e., the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The rural workers were dependent on seasonal labour and low wages. The land reform sought a paradigm shift for a more just working conditions of farmland, possession of means of production and redistribution of land ownership.

Records indicate that in the Portuguese agrarian world, after decades of exploitation by aristocratic families and instituted political forces, rural workers across Portugal saw land reform as a way to finally claim the right to directly cultivate the land and the means of agricultural production for their own benefit. During this period, new labour conditions were implemented, cooperatives were established and estates were occupied by former daily-waged workers, and the military expropriated about nine thousand square kilometres of agricultural land. (Rezola, 2007)

The first popular occupations occurred between the end of 1974 and 1975, mostly in the big southern states, but rapidly expanded to Ribatejo (Rezola, 2007). Despite being unlawful, the occupations were founded on under the concept of a

‘revolutionary legitimacy’, and were subsequently endorsed by the state in July 1975. This endorsement occurred shortly after the first free elections had been held in April 1975 of that year, from a Constituent Assembly that drew up a new constitution.13 Due to the ambiguity (socialist, neoliberal and conservative) of the Military Junta’s plans, land reform was often supported or framed by trade unions, the influential Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the Socialist Party and groups of MFA soldiers (Rezola, 2007).

However, the Portuguese Revolution was not solely the platform for political intervention and military support provided by national communists and liberals. The revolutionary process also attracted leftist intellectuals, activists, journalists, photographers and filmmakers’ attention from all over the world. Prevenient mainly from central Europe, the activists were curious about what was happening in Portugal and were willing to take part as spectators and participants. This phenomenon can be seen in the documentary film Another Country (Outro País) (2000), directed by the Brazilian-Portuguese filmmaker Sérgio Tréfaut. The film consists of interviews conducted by the filmmaker with directors, photographers, journalists and activists who travelled to Portugal during this period, including Robert Kramer, Thomas Harlan, Glauber Rocha, and Sebastião Salgado.

Attracted by the Portuguese socialist revolution, German filmmaker Thomas Harlan and a group of friends drove to Portugal in the Spring of 1975, during the PREC. The group consisted of educated leftists from Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, and the United States. Francis Pisani14, one of Harlan’s associates stated that ‘Portugal was the revolution at the end of the southern highway. Instead of

13 However, the first free elections in November 1975 interrupted and brought this process to an end. In November 1975 the candidate of the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista—PS) Portuguese politician Mário Soares was elected Prime Minister, defining a turn toward neo-liberalism and a progressive end of the Socialist project. With still a notable implication in the present political situation of the country, this turn counted on the influence and intervention of the United States in the context of the endeavours against the advance of communism in all fronts. For further details on the influence of Frank Carlucci— United States ambassador to Portugal—and Henry Kissinger—United States secretary of estate—on the course of the events during the period after the revolution and in the political resolution to Portugal, see also: Gomes, B., Moreira de Sá, T., 2008. Carlucci vs. Kissinger - Os EUA e a Revolução Portuguesa. Lisboa: D. Quixote. 14 Francis Pisani also tells his experience during the Portuguese Revolution in the book Torre Bela, On a tous le droit d’avoir une vie, published in 1976, in Paris.

50 the Cuban, the Chinese or the Chilean Revolution, which were far away, you got in the car and you arrived there.’ (Costa, 2011b, 69') For Harlan and his friends Portugal was the revolution taking place just around the corner from central Europe.

Harlan’s first idea was to film the everyday events of the revolution (Costa, 2011b, 3'51''), and upon their arrival, Harlan and his crew began by filming the Lisbon Artillery Regiment (RAL, later called RALIS). However, soon afterwards, they learnt about the occupation that was taking place in Ribatejo, in Torre Bela estate. This property, owned by the Duke of Lafões, was situated in Manique do Intendente, Azambuja (in central Portugal). Before the occupation of Torre Bela, during the dictatorship, only a small percentage of the arable lands were used for agriculture (Cooperativa Agrícola Popular da Torre Bela, 1976), while the rest of the property was kept as a ground for hunting, and a combination of pine and eucalyptus plantations.

On learning about the Torre Bela uprising, Harlan and his crew moved to Azambuja, where the workers were helding meetings with Duke to negotiate their precarious labour conditions. (Costa, 2012, p. 33) Portuguese filmmaker and researcher José Filipe Costa (2012) has developed a thorough investigation about the trip of the leftist activists to Torre Bela and the filming process few years ago. According to his research, this is the situation which the team came upon on their arrival to Torre Bela:

On the morning of 23 April 1975, one year after the so-called ‘Carnation Revolution’, about a hundred people gathered at Manique do Intendente, a village situated some 70 km north of Lisbon. Their objective was to occupy the neighbouring estate of Torre Bela, which covered a vast expanse of 1700 hectares, the property of the Dukes of Lafões, members of the House of Braganza, part of the Portuguese royal family. The small crowd mainly comprised agricultural wage labourers from adjacent villages, veterans of the Portuguese colonial wars, many of whom were unemployed. (Costa, 2012, p. 16)

Although similar occupations/negotiations were happening across the country, what was unique about this occupation was the absence of a political party in the organisation of the popular movement. The occupation was organised by former workers of Torre Bela and local inhabitants of the surrounding villages, many of whom were illiterate, came from families that had lived under Lafões’s family oppression for generations, and were participating in direct political action for the first time in their lives. Due to its politically independent nature that it emerged by the organised collective action of illiterate rural workers, Torre Bela’s occupation is an important component of the symbolic and mythological narrative pertaining the 25th April Revolution. Torre Bela became well known in the Portuguese history for being the only ‘successful’ popular upheaval supported and driven by the will of the former daily-waged workers.

‘complexity and vibration of the ‘real’’15 in Torre Bela

During the dictatorship there was a scarcity of images portraying the social conditions of the people in Portugal; because the means of image production were monopolised by the ministry of propaganda of Estado Novo16 and the rest of the production was subject to censorship. Films like Leão da Estrela (Duarte, 1947), Pátio das Cantigas (Ribeiro, 1942) or A Canção de Lisboa (Telmo, 1933) were commissions supported by the regime, representing Salazar’s ideology of a poor, ignorant and obedient people, and whose values were based on religion, family and imperial nationalism.

In the wake of 25th April, film gained a complete new role. Image production was a way to put into circulation images of the ongoing reconstruction of the country. From north to south, from east to west, filmmakers document: social housing planning and construction (Teles, 1976); public demonstrations and the military movement (Colectivo de Trabalhadores da Actividade Cinematográfica, 1975); the agrarian reform (Grupo Zero, 1977; Teles, 1975); and occupations of the industrial

15 Costa, 2011a, p. 111 16 Estado Novo (in English, New State) is how the dictatorship was coined by Salazar.

52 means of production by the former workers (Macedo, 1975). During the same period, Portuguese filmmaker Rui Simões directed a film about the historical facts of the fascist regime of António Oliveira Salazar, entitled Deus, Pátria, Família (1975). Although the main focus was the revolution, Simões’ film also demonstrates de urgency to tell the story of the untold events during the times when information was controlled.

After the revolution, film is an instrument of political culture and responsiveness with the capacity to reach a wide audience; it serves to bring the images of the ongoing revolution to the people. These films were mainly broadcasted via the Portuguese national broadcast channel (RTP) few months after being shot. And film making became also an activity where the workers and the filmmakers work collectively. José Filipe Costa remarks how film-crew mingled with the workers and the people struggling on the ground. Recalling the SAAL housing projects, where architects worked alongside the peoples, filmmakers were simultaneously spectators, activists, participants and story-tellers:

Production units and film-making co-operatives including Cinequanon, 14 Cinequipa, Grupo Zero and Virver were established. The organisation of these groups and their modes of film production were often shaped by the same concerns, motivations and models of collective organisation as the agricultural co-operatives and the worker and resident committees that were being formed throughout the country. (Costa, 2011a, p. 108)

Cinema played a key role in the formation of a new political identity and awareness during the PREC. Produced in a documentary film style, the films made by the cooperatives of filmmakers were usually described by a voiceover and a selection of interviews with actors involved on recurring situations such as demonstrations, assemblies, occupations or other scenes from the daily life of the revolution. Based on expository units, these films would provide the political interpretation of the events, which according to Costa, ‘flatten(ed) them into a uniform discourse of militant cinema.’ (Costa, 2011a, p. 108)

Their main endeavour was to deliver a new image of the people to the people17 via the national television channel. The rhythm and timing of television production demanded an urgency that framed a specific way of making. The events had to be immediately filmed and explained to be shown on the public TV almost concurrently to the time of their editing.

With similar motivation to the militant films shot in Portugal during this period, the film Torre Bela (1977)18 is the documentation of the self-proclaiming community of peasant workers seizing control of the estate where they worked for generations, which consequently they transformed into a cooperative. The film Torre Bela takes us directly into the internal working processes and contradictions of the revolution. In a long feature documentary film, Harlan shows conversations between the workers about the cooperative and the subsequent occupation of the farm; meetings between the population and the military in Lisbon in order to find a solution for Torre Bela’s situation; and the visit of the military members to Torre Bela, and several general assemblies in a public square (former square of daily wage19).

17 Similarly to what happen in Portugal during that time, after the independence of Mozambique, Mozambican political leader Samora Machel implemented a large-scale operation of travelling cinema across the country. The new-born Nacional Institut of Cinema (Instituto Nacional de Cinema—INC) was in charge of bringing to the people an image of the plurality of peoples in Mozambique. After a long-lasting colonial occupation and ‘By the time of independence, the majority of Mozambicans had no prior experience of the moving image, but cinema was recognised as having a key role in the formation of a national identity constituted during the armed struggle.’ (Eshun and Gray, 2011, p. 10). In The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography (issue of Third Text, 2011), British artists and theorists Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray map revolutionary and militant cinema and its global film making networks. 18 According to José Filipe Costa’s research, ‘Torre Bela was presented for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival 1977. It was only released commercially in a Portuguese theatre in 2007, although a DVD version had been circulated in 2004 as part of a cinema collection promoted by Público, a leading Portuguese national newspaper. The rights for the film were sold to Italian, French and German TV channels. Footage from Torre Bela can be found in at least two other Portuguese films, Bom Povo Português (1980) and Lei da Terra (1977).’ (Costa, 2012, p. 5) 19 Square of daily wage are public spaces where seasonal and precarious workers gather waiting for an employer to offer work for the day.

Fig. 1—Booklet Cooperativa Agricola Popular da Torre Bela, ‘Portico’ poem, p. 1

Despite sharing similar incentives with other militant films (documenting the taking place of the revolution), Torre Bela steps out of the dynamics described above. In the end, Harlan was more an external observer curious about the changing conditions. Contrary to the films broadcasted in national television, the film was screened at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival; which implied a different temporality for its making (no urgency to be shown in RTP) and aimed for a completely different audience, the white bourgeois intellectuals.

Torre Bela’s footage was filmed over a period of three months, between April and August 1975. The film-crew was constantly present on the farm, following the community’s daily life and filming long sequence shots. Without a voiceover or an expository discourse, the narrative is defined by the intensity of discussions and debates between the squatters. Most of the times, the conversations are not understood by the non-Portuguese speakers filming the events. More than the

55 content of the speeches, the camera man follows gestures, emphasis, body language and tones. As a result:

In Harlan’s Torre Bela […] we are faced with the chaotic emotional power of the different voices of all the protagonists, constantly overlapping, often angry or emotional. We see the squatters struggling with new calls for action and with new political words that were becoming part of their daily speech. (Costa, 2011a, p. 108)

Without having a prescribed script the film follows the group of squatters’ struggle and their roles, directions and claims. Based on long sequences, the film unfolds through a totally different rhythm, when compared to the majority of the militant films made during the same period. Torre Bela seems to cover the natural cadence of events. Contrary to other films produced in Portugal during the same period (mentioned above); in Torre Bela we see actions and conversations taking place in front of the camera with no interpretation and contextualization provided to the viewer. It feels like Harlan lets action lead the course of the film, driven by spontaneous conversations and debates between the squatters.

By neither employing the everyday political language typical of this period in radio and television, nor a congruent narrative toward a political and social message of emancipation of Torre Bela’s workers, the film becomes a unique case of that period’s documentary film-making. The shooting of the film overlaps with the taking place of people’s action in the building up of a new social order and the emergence of a new political awareness. What drives the making and editing of the documentary is not the expository framing and the aural exposition (voiceover) driving, making, framing, or organising the images. Instead, Torre Bela is driven by a narrative that creates sequences based on the internal relations between image and sound. It keeps a certain spatio-temporal and narrative unity from which the squatters’ contradictions and doubts emerge (Costa, 2011a).

The scene of the occupation of the palace is a good example of how Harlan conserved the frictions, complexities and ambiguities of the event. These were approaches that mostly were absent from the militant cinema made in the same period. Arguably, these cinematic tropes made Torre Bela seem more ‘real’ than the other films, but also, precisely because of that apparent ‘realism’, more problematic. The next section is going to look at the occupation scene in order to investigate the tensions between the role of the camera as a witness and/or as an instigator of the occupation.

Staging the Occupation Scene and the Space Behind-the-Camera

The occupation of the palace in Torre Bela is where the formation of the declamatory event (arguably, the one that interrupts the course of history) and its documentation overlap. Without voiceover and interpretation, the viewers of the film have access to every step, from the conversations before entering the palace to the seizure of the property. ‘Palace’ is how the aristocratic house of the Duke of Lafões used to be known by the former workers. Opulent and magnificent the palace sits in the middle of the extensive property; representing the symbolic presence of the previous owners. Occupying the property can be seen as the ultimate gesture for the fall of the feudalist working conditions and unequal division of land perpetrated by the former regime.

The reason why I want to draw attention to this scene is not only because it showed an important step in the process of emancipation of the workers. What I want to highlight here is how this scene helps to analyse the conditions of its documentation, or better said, the conditions of image production and how it can provide glimpses of the aesthetics of the ‘evental new’—the event that claims something new. The overlapping between the documentation and the formation of the emblematic event helps to grasp mechanisms of the event formation and to link it with the aesthetics of the new in Torre Bela. I argue that the occupation scene sets up a series of exposures beyond the film’s frame, which are intrinsically connected with the aesthetics of event production.

The purpose of this dissertation is not to assess the truth or falsity of the event that took place in Torre Bela. Nor is it to assess the effectiveness of documentary and militant film in documenting reality and conveying a political agenda—or even to explore its manipulations. To indicate how the film is shot and edited is important insofar as the discussion does not imply a pure real (which is failing to be portrayed), but rather takes for granted that what is ‘shown and told’ (to use terminology used in exhibition studies20) is already a construction formed by the systems of meaning of revolution.

The Occupation of the Palace

The occupation scene starts with people gathering outside the palace. At the same time, unidentified conversation in a tumultuous tone can be heard. Some people yell at each other, while others show a clear feeling of concern. All of a sudden, the camera shows the inside of the palace. Empty living room and silent interiors. A beautifully tiled fireplace, black and white photographs in elaborate silver frames, closed windows and undefined piano music. There are close-ups of family photographs, paintings and other objects. At a gentle pace people’s voices start to emerge. It is still quiet. In the meantime, it seems like people begin to enter the empty palace. Voices inhabit the space and merge with the music in the backdrop. The music is still audible. A middle-aged man checks some drawers in an unidentified room. There are people. A young couple, who do not look like rural workers, fiddle around with books that were sitting in wooden book shelves and talk quietly to each other. They are eventually revealed as the educated leftist intellectuals who joined, from Lisbon, the cause of the people in the rural providing education and politicising the people. Random voices obscure the piano music. Nobody seems to be rushing. Slowly the rooms are being inhabited. The camera rambles around, from room to room, framing random portraits on the wall, knick- knacks and details of the interiors. From minute sixty-six onwards the subject shifts. The director focuses on people’s movements. Scattered around the house, they try on

20 Regarding bibliography on showing and telling see: Tony Bennett. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge.

58 clothes that were stored in the drawers and closets to check if they fit, or simply to impersonate their former users—for instance, the Duke. At the end of the occupation sequence, when the occupiers are in the little chapel juxtaposed to the main house, looking at the liturgical paraphernalia, one of them puts on the priest’s raiment and recites the beginning of a prayer, cupping his hands together. They laugh out loud at the same time as they seem to release some of the tension and evident preoccupation about the situation. Someone says: ‘We will be all arrested’, as if sensing the future.21

After the gathering outside the palace, the camera shows the property’s interiors. Only after the camera rambles for few seconds inside the palace, the squatters enter the building and are seen grabbing books, trying out cloths, and checking

21 My description of the occupation scene is edited in italics because it operates as a replacement of the moving images. It does not mean to be an objective description, but my reading of the sequence of images.

59 the belongings of the aristocratic family. However, by the way the occupation scene was filmed, the camera must have been placed inside the palace before the squatters entered. The sequence of the scenes yields questions regarding the hows and whys of this sequence, and Harlan and his crew’s agency in staging the scenes.

The intervention of the leftist intellectuals in the developments of the uprising brings some ambiguity to the reading of the event. It sheds light on the invisible dialogue between the ‘in-front’ and the ‘behind’ of the apparatus of recording, the camera. This entails asking how one influences the other in the crux of the production of an event. In other words, what is the importance between what is visible and what passes as invisible in the reading of the event. How does this dialogue allow for a glimpse of other occurrences that are not necessarily framed and portrayed by the camera, namely the positionality of the filmmaker, his intentions and revolutionary drives?

Thomas Harlan and his crew were not mere observers or even professional documentarians or journalists. In Red Line (Linha Vermelha) (2011b), a documentary film about the making of Torre Bela, undertaken almost forty years afterwards, José Filipe Costa interviews some of Torre Bela’s protagonists and also its crew members. It becomes clear that the participation of the director and his crew in the development of the occupation and in the making of the film was crucial to the moulding of the events and the occupation of the palace. Harlan tells Costa during the interview:

I believe that objectively, with camera in hand, we were manipulators. How that actually worked, I do not know. But it pushed things forward, rushed them. There was a pressure that came from us. (Costa, 2011b, 46')

According to Costa’s research (2012), after settling in at the farm and taking over the land, the workers were afraid to take the next step, which would entail taking over the palace. The director, wanting to speed up this process, acted behind the scenes as an emissary to the military and arranged for a meeting between a group

60 of squatters (among them Wilson Filipe—the main protagonist of the film) and the military police in a headquarters in Lisbon. In that meeting, captured on film in Torre Bela, Captain Banazol tells the squatters: ‘You should not wait for a legal decree that states you can occupy it. Occupy it and the law will follow.’ (Harlan, 1977, 69’) With this statement the squatters’ forthcoming action was already legitimised.22

At the same time, despite Harlan’s assertions, the narrative of the event as resulting from the film-crew’s pure manipulation of the event, seems too simplistic. The glimpse of the presence and influence of the film-crew does not invalidate or undermine the revolutionary emancipation of the rural workers, but expands the event’s space of production—and exhibition, as what is being shown and told. What I mean is that what was seen as the cause of the event, i.e., oppression of the people leading to the occupation of the bastion of the aristocratic power, cannot be seen as the only element fostering the emancipatory event. Harlan and the crew, therefore, the behind the camera, are also participants acting in the ‘darkness’ of the scene. Without a previous script, workers and film- crew write the event on its making.

Acknowledging the occupation scene and Harlan’s intervention implies an expansion of the space of exposition—as a field of exposures of the intentional and unintentionally exposed elements—presented in the film. It is not only the struggle of the people and the unfolding of the events framed by the camera. The event also includes the spaces behind the camera, the motivations of the crew and their participation in the formulation of the aesthetics of the event. The scene of the event is also the invisible spaces occupied by Harlan and his crew. In this way, I argue that Harlan is not just a documentarian of the event taking place in front of the camera, but one squatter among others. Harlan brings his knowledge and political awareness into the orchestration of the events, and moulds the sequences according to his grammar of revolution.

22 Harlan even asserts that the position of partner in the ‘unlawful’ occupation—a role that he believes should have been the army’s—was actually taken by the film-making team. (Costa, 2011b)

On the Opening Up of the Evental Space—The Swarm of Events

[Events] are only to be found where other events also take place, have taken place or will take place, so that every event that concerns us or that we may be involved in always already comes about in a swarm of events. (Nowotny, 2011, n.p.)

The presence of the crew as interventionists in the occupation brings a more complex view of what an event encompasses—namely, its actors, forces, influences, staging, representations, interpretations and exposures. It is not a matter of a singular interruption that takes place as an isolated occurrence. Instead, knowing of Harlan’s motivations and presence enlarges the network of instances and influences that already took place, are taking place and will take place at the moment of the occupation. In doing so, the monolithic event implodes into an expanded network of micro-occurrences dependent on being enunciated as events.

Austrian philosopher and translator Stefan Nowotny writes about the politics of enunciation in the formation of an ‘event’. Thinking about the relentless fetishisation of the concept of the event, he presents it as contingent, multiple and fragmented; inasmuch as it depends on gestures of enunciation—‘saying’ the event—that isolate the event from the rest of the so-called normative occurrences. Instead of a singular occasion that disrupts the historical linearity of time, the event occurs as a plural manifestation. Every event is to be understood as one of many in a multiplicity of occurrences. According to Nowotny, we cannot talk of a single event, but a ‘swarm of events’.

Contrary to Badiou’s argument, where a single event exceeds its ordinary inscription and through the fidelity of the subject inscribes a new form of being; every event is necessarily part of a more complex chain of occurrences. Nowotny states that:

Events always only occur in plural is consequently not solely to be understood as meaning that every event is always one of several. Rather, every event is inherently always already manifold, a complexity that factors of action may enter into as well as event components that precede the action or reach beyond its scope. If it is nevertheless possible to speak meaningfully here and there of “one” event, then this possibility is thus always also due to certain procedures of interpretation, of which the precondition is in turn that the focuses of events and concatenations of events constituting “one” event transgress certain thresholds of perception and namability and appear as connected at the same time, so that “this one” event can be imbued with its specific profile. (Nowotny, 2011, n.p.)

Events are necessarily plural and contingent. We can still (artificially) individualise events in their singularity, but they are always constituted by a manifold constellation of events. In other to be singularised, events depend on a system of meanings and interpretations that isolate one from the ‘always already many’. The process of selection is based on a grammar of change and disruption. In order for the singular event to signify, it needs to come about in aesthetic forms that resonate with the irruption of something new. For instance, the examples provided by Badiou emphasise on breakthroughs in European politics, sciences and culture; suggesting that non-European subjects are less able to overcome their ordinary condition and have a saying in the writing of historical events.23 The Eurocentric reading of events deployed by Badiou renders visible the process of selection/interpretation of an interruption and how it operates under a particular grammar of change and innovation, or even progress.

My argument does not intend to assert though that what is highlighted as an event has been already previously written and, therefore, by dissecting the actual

23 As cited above, Badiou states: ‘Such events are well and truly attested: the French Revolution in 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style. But also: the Cultural Revolution in China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg.’ (Badiou, 2001, p. 41)

63 moment one can foresee events to come, or clearly map what preceded it. Rather, what is at stake in my argument is the fact that although occurrences do not cease to take place, the constitution of the so-called event as an overly identified occurrence, is not a transcendental fact. Instead, the process of capturing the event as a signifying occurrence happens within the limits of what is thinkable, sayable and visible as ‘new’ and emancipatory. Therefore, event cannot be decoupled from configurations of a historical-political definition of event that comes about through power relations, forces, and enunciations.24

Another aspect highlighted by Nowotny is the necessity to go beyond the mythologem of the event and understanding the enunciation of the event in its historical-political milieu. The difference between occurrences—those that not cease to happen—is not intrinsic to their nature; for example, when we classify some as being more important than others. The hierarchy depends on gestures of enunciation (naming an occurrence as an event) through which few phenomena stand out from the pool of multiple and micro events.

In viewing of Torre Bela, the implosion of the singular event into a manifold event (that took place, takes place and will take place) disperses the monolithic event onto other temporalities and instances. This gesture sheds light on event’s production in the film (the framed images) and recognises other interventions before and behind the scenes that put the so-called abrupt disruption of the event into perspective and dependent on a chain of enunciations and always already existing structures of meaning.

The Cinematic Apparatus as Dispositif

But the myth was the strongest and it would remain so for a long time. I remember my last conversation with Althusser. He was back from Portugal in full ‘Carnation Revolution’, and this time, that was it! After many failed

24 A journalist friend of mine about the neutrality and veracity of news used to tell me: ‘It is not important whether or not it is true, but that it becomes viral.’ (Daniel Belo, journalist of the Portuguese public radio station, RTP)

outbursts, including our month of May [1968], Portugal was about to carry out the first [European] socialist revolution since 1917, consolidate it and from there spread it to the whole of Europe. I listened to him as in zero-gravity. Facing me was not a likeable young leftist nut, but one of the greatest French intellectuals of his time. For him, as for others, revolution was in the air, and had to be, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. He would always see that grin. And he wouldn’t (nor would anyone) ever see the Cat. (Marker, 2009, n.p.)

After recognising the multiplicity of events contained in every single event, this dissertation is now concerned with the surpluses of the historical event that are left unheard by the singularisation of the event. Stefan Nowotny’s thoughts on the event help to expand the notion of event into its ‘inherently always already manifold’ occasions (2011, n.p.), where previous and future occurrences, interpretations, historical-political contexts, newly found political processes of subjectivation and enunciation, take active parts. However, the question about the meanings of the surpluses of historical events remains. How to read what is out of frame, what passes as invisible and is intentionally left unspoken? How does unframed occurrences signify if not as a wilful hidden truth?

During the whole film of Torre Bela, Harlan does not expose the direction taking place behind the scenes; the film-crew, director, arrangements with the military, and preparation of the occupation are hidden from the camera’s view.25 The viewer only has access to the results of Harlan’s orchestration. In this regard, Costa states:

The team’s role as a driving force in the creation of the event is a basic feature of its own construction, and this is something that is not seen in the film’s images. Its transparency, the appearance that everything happens ‘naturally’ in front of the camera in a kind of continuous present – we are there with them, without

25 José Filipe Costa in Red Line (Linha Vermelha) (2011b)—essay-film on the making of Torre Bela—plays an audio file of the shooting before the occupation cut out by Harlan in the final editing of the film. One can hear Harlan directing the people and asking the squatters to repeat the scene and to act it out in a more vivid manner.

the film-makers’ mediation, with no interference from the filmmaking apparatus – keeps the spectator captivated by the impression of an untouched, non-fabricated reality. The film-making team’s production process, making both the film and Torre Bela’s experience happen, did not leave any trace in the final result. (Costa, 2011a, p. 115)

The cinematic apparatus, sitting between the occupiers and the film-crew, operates as a mechanism that renders the single event into visible and audible. In this sense, one could say that the cinematic apparatus is actually that which brings something into visibility and turns it into thinkable matter. Thinking of the camera as an apparatus, recalls French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s text ‘What is a dispositif?’ (1992). In this text, Deleuze devises a new reading of Michel Foucault notion of a social apparatus. Foucault extensively elaborates on the term ‘apparatus’, especially in the seventies, when he begins to concern himself with what he calls ‘governmentality’26 or the ‘government of men’ (2010). Dispositif, or ‘apparatus’ in English, aims to account for a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge (docile, yet free bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects in the very process of their desubjectification). According to Deleuze:

[t]he apparatuses (…) are machines which make one see and speak. Visibility cannot be traced back to a general source of light which forms variable shapes inseparable from the apparatus in question. Each apparatus has its own way of structuring light, the way in which it falls, blurs and disperses, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects that are dependent on it for their existence and causing them to disappear. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 160 [my emphasis])

26 ‘Governmentality’ is a portmanteau of govern and ‘mentalité’ (mentality) coined by Michel Foucault to address how the state exerts power controlling the body and the mind of the people through self- regulation and control interiorised by the individuals. (Foucault, 2010)

The light metaphor in relation to the selective nature of the apparatus is very pertinent for the sake of this discussion. The cinematic apparatus is the one that sheds light on, and therefore, renders visible what we know of ‘what happened’ in the farm. Consequently, it causes other events to disappear, to be left as the ‘unmoving histories’ of the revolution. (Foucault, 2002a) This disappearance does not only refer to what is not exposed to the camera and recorded to posterity; it also entails the system of meanings of what an occupation and popular uprising can potentially bring a new to the grammar of signifying events. The ‘light’ of the apparatus in Torre Bela is directed by Harlan’s previous assumptions about revolution, social struggle and land reform. Harlan’s previous experience in the Soviet Union27 and in Chile28--also as spectator and documentarian—framed the signifying ground of Torre Bela’s direction and editorial decisions.

The direction of the gestures and, necessarily, the meanings of Torre Bela occupation, captures the emergence of the potential new immanent in every manifold event. However, it is not a declamatory one, but instead the process of subjectification present in the ebbs and flows of human affairs. What ends up being the occupation of Torre Bela is a combination of ideas put together by those who claimed to know about social struggles, revolutionary upheavals, cooperative formation, historical social revolutions, the taking over of the means of production, and similar political processes. In doing so, and following Deleuze’s argument, the scripted orchestration of the event by the apparatus (of cinema and light), at the time of giving birth to the occupation of the palace also provokes other ‘occupations’ to disappear. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 160)

‘Representing Reality’ in the Documentary Film Genre

27 Soviet Union came out of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 in Russia and united the Soviet and Socialist Republics under the administration of the Communist Party. The USSR (Union of Soviet and Socialist Republics) was instituted in 1922 until 1991. 28 Salvador Allende was the first elected Marxist president of a Latin American country between 1970 and 1973. In 11 September 1973 he was brutally assassinated by a military coup sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, which put Augusto Pinochet in power for a long and bloody dictatorship until 1990. (Qureshi, 2009)

The camera inhabits an ambivalent space where it: a) conveys Harlan’s narrative; and b) converts the space of the event into a stage where the workers become ‘the authors and the actors of their own drama’ (Marx, 2000, p. 223). If the film-crew’s presence writes the historical narrative of a group of people that had long been oppressed with no previous knowledge about socialism; it is also relevant to acknowledge the conditions created by the camera for the staging of the event. Although the latter might seem to imply commonly-known criticisms of the distinction between reality and fiction in documentary films, what I want to emphasise is the multiplicity of representations’ discourses at play in the event; which the presence of thecamera renders more evident.

According to Costa, the staging of the event encompasses the interplay between the film-crew’s presence and the political emancipation of the squatters. It is in the exposure of the European intellectuals to the workers (and vice versa) that new identities and political models emerge. Therefore, in the scene in which people walk around the palace with surprising ease and seem to act naturally for the camera, they are acting, but what they act out is the seizure of power. Costa argues that, ‘they are acting the seizure of power over that space, gazing at the objects, playing the piano, dressing in the costumes of the previous ‘characters’ on the stage.’ (Costa, 2011a, p. 112)29

The issues of representation in documentary film have led a long-standing discussion in film studies (Mayolo and Ospina, 1978; Rocha, 1982; Bills, 1991; Nash, 2007; Butt, 2007; Enwezor, 2008; Faguet, 2009). Over the past few decades, practitioners and scholars made an effort to erode the artificial distinction between the object being documented, the presence of the filmmaker, the apparatus, and the editing process. Colombian filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina contributed a great deal to this discussion. Their films Listen Look (Oiga Vea) (1971) and Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo) (1978) directed in the 1970’s are remarkable examples.

29 Staging and representation will be treated in the next chapter in greater detail.

In their films, Mayolo and Ospina question how the social conditions of the so- called Third World was being portrayed by Colombian documentarians, and exchanged as a commodity to be consumed by Western audiences. Far from exposing the injustices of an unequal society, a considerable number of Colombian films in the 1970’s were mediums for exploitation and fetishisation that serve to fulfil the curiosity of a remote audience. As noted by curator and writer Michèle Faguet in an essay about Mayolo and Ospina’s work:

However, a desire to produce critical consciousness through the transparency or visibility of marginality always carries the risk of producing the opposite effect: that of cynical indifference which comes from a saturation and fetishisation of this visibility in the absence of proper analysis or even a basic code of ethics. (Faguet, 2009, n.p.)

Colombian documentary film in the 1970’s consisted on the footage of subjects who are often depicted as possessing no agency due to their poverty. The subjects of these films range from poor families to street children, prostitutes, drug addicts or the mentally ill. These images are afterwards put together with an explanatory voiceover informing about the social mechanisms that precipitate such grave social ills (i.e. the civil war with its mass forced displacements of rural dwellers to the cities).

Driven by questions of representation of poverty and exploitation through cinema, Mayolo and Ospina directed Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo) in 1978 as a satirical commentary on the ‘exploitative’ Colombian documentaries. The film tells the story of an unscrupulous film director named Alfredo García, played by Mayolo, as he and his assistant move around Cali and Bogotá looking for unwilling subjects for a documentary commissioned by German television. The film was shot in 16mm, and alternates between colour footage and black-and-white. The colour shows the fictional directors going around the city and forcefully portraying people in the street; whereas, the black-and-white images depict the process of filming and action off-camera, i.e., ‘the behind the camera’. (Faguet, 2009)

The two levels of representation achieved with the colour and black-and-white montages offer a critique of cinema within cinema itself. The viewer glimpses into the scenes ‘behind the camera’ where the fictional filmmaker coaches the dwellers with the promise of a few coins; beggars, abandoned infants, street performers and underprivileged-looking individuals earn some cash to pose for the ruthless filmmakers. By revealing both sides of the shooting, Mayolo and Ospina articulate the layers of representation fostered by the camera in order to problematise the so-called neutrality of the filmmaker in documentary films.

For the presentation of Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo) in Paris in 197730, the duo wrote an essay entitled ‘What is Poverty Porn?’ (‘Qué es la Pornomiseria?’), where they elaborated on the appropriation by the documentary film genre of the style identified with independent film.

If independent film had used misery as a trope for denunciation and analysis, mercantilism used it as a commodity to fuel the exploitation of the very same misery. The rush for profit found a method to stop the premises of analysis of poverty. On the contrary, capitalism created demagogic tropes and converted cinema in a genre that could be called miserabilist cinema or poverty porn. (Ospina and Mayolo, 1977 [original emphasis])31

In cinematic terms, Vampires of Poverty emphasises the ways in which the camera forges and manipulates what is being represented and its narrative in documentary film production, a genre that tends to imply a seemingly neutral and objective voice. By doing so, Mayolo and Ospina capture the effects of the presence of the camera in the reactions and postures of those who are being

30 Vampires of Poverty is first screened in Paris in the same year that Torre Bela is screened in the Cannes Festival. 31 My translation from the original in Spanish: ‘Si la miseria le había servido al cine independiente como elemento de denuncia y análisis, el afán mercantilista la convertió en v\avula de escape del sistema mismo que la generó. Este afán de lucro no permitía un método que descubriera nuevas premisas para el análisis de la probreza sino que, al contrario, creó esquemas demagógicos hasta convertirse en un género que podriamos llamar cine miserabilista o porno-miseria.’ (Ospina and Mayolo, 1977 [original emphasis])

70 represented—for instance, the mentally ill woman trying to hit the camera in the streets of Cali; or the kids jumping to the water fountain for few coins.

Fig. 6—Kids jumping to the water for money in Vampires of Poverty (Ospina and Mayolo, 1977)

The ways in which the camera emphasises/fosters the posture of the represented is in line with the analysis devised by British art historian Gavin Butt (2007), about Shirley Clarke’s film Portrait of Jason (1967). In this text, Butt points out that the degree of representation present in the gestures of those being portrayed by the camera ultimately undermines the veracity and realism of the narrative itself. According to Gavin Butt, those in front of the camera also disturb the expected authenticity of what is being framed and produce an ironic situation. In Shirley Clarke’s film, an aging African-American gay hustler, named Jason Holiday, narrates his story from the heydays of the decadence New York night club and art scene. During the interview, Jason overplays himself by calling upon his performative nature, up until when he gets more emotional with the development of his own life-story and, at some point, bursts into tears.

Fig. 7—Jason performing in front of the camera in Portrait of Jason (Clarke, 1967). Video still: 41’44’’

When Jason unexpectedly starts crying, the hidden film-crew shout from behind the camera: ‘be honest mother fucker. Stop that acting.’ (Clarke, 1967) This interruption brings to the fore some interesting aspects in relation to modes of representation, including, ‘representing’ one’s own life in front of the camera (or acting one’s own drama, as Marx asserted). According to Butt,

What makes Portrait of Jason especially interesting in this scene is how the idea of ‘seriousness’ in art and performance is challenged or even subverted as Carl— the film-crew member who shouts at Jason—refuses to take the outward signs of Jason’s emotional state seriously. (Butt, 2007, p. 48)

To not take seriously the crying of Jason paradoxically puts into question, not so much whether or not this tears are an overrepresentation, but the veracity of what

72 has been enacted by Jason prior to his breakdown in front of the camera. Carl’s comment undermines seemingly clear-cut binaries between sincere/insincere, authentic/fake, honest/dishonest, real/theatrical, serious/trivial, over emphasising the modes of representation happening before the camera (Butt, 2007). What is more:

Jason’s notional nightclub act is made flesh before our eyes through the medium of Clarke’s lens. The slippage from verbal description to vocal enactment not only introduces popular performance alongside autobiographical narrative into the film’s mode of representation of Jason’s life, but also brings about a dizzying and ambiguous play different levels of performance of that life. This critical moment in Portrait of Jason produces a filmic document about what Jason’s nightclub performance might be like, but, as performance in its own right taking place before Clarke’s camera, it also raises questions of authorship and spectatorship in relation to the cultural codes of avant-garde cinema. (Butt, 2007, p. 44)

Documentary films tend to make use of tropes to remind the viewer of the real- time duration of the documenting technologies of the moving image and sound recording: direct sound, long sequence shots, etc. At the same time, while deploying codes of ‘realism’, they imply that what we see on screen happens in real time. As argued by Butt, the ‘real’ and ‘reel’ become indistinguishable (Butt, 2007, p. 45). However, the further irony that Portrait of Jason—and also Torre Bela— exhibits is that, even though such aesthetic strategies are used to evoke an ‘authentic’ and ‘spontaneous’ sense of vérité, there are other instances that destabilise this intention. These instances, such as, Carl’s comment, help blur the artificial binary between fiction and reality, and emphasise the dialogue and ambiguity between the before and the behind the camera.

If ‘poverty porn’ discloses the economic exploitation and subsequent fetishisation of misery and the underprivileged, Jason’s acting his own tragedy reminds us that the filmic apparatus also projects a space of representation (‘the actors of their

73 own drama’). I argue that the cinematic apparatus creates a liminal space of unscripted collaborations between film-crew and subjects portrayed. Those mediating the events are nothing but implicated subjects in the formation of ‘reality’—if we can still call it like that—as much as the participants of the film become aware of the theatricality of their own life. The liminal space of the documentary urges for a new reading that understands the role of the document beyond mere information. Despite caring that burden of reality, documentation is never to make immanent a singular overwhelming truth. It is simply to collect in different forms a series of statements in the enunciative function of the archive (Foucault, 2002a). The document is another voice in the polyphony of polyphonies.

Prescribing the Event

(…) we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive. (Foucault, 2002a, p. 145)

Now we have grounds to assess the formation of the event under a different guise. What needs to be observed in ‘Prescribing the Event’ is how the ‘sayable’—the enunciatory—is being considered in the manifestations of the aesthetics of the revolution. Although I have been using the term visible more often, when aesthetics are considered they encompass all senses that configure experience and its logics of signification. The event in Torre Bela is not only determined by the apparatus of visibility, hence, the camera. The aesthetics of the political event also need to be considered within the context of the enunciation of statements. The question that needs to be asked at this point is: who is ‘speaking’ in Torre Bela’s event?

Drawing on Rancière’s thoughts about the power structures of speech, enunciation does not stand for the simple act of uttering a sound or the inscription of a word. Nor is it merely the oral unit of a linguistic sign. ‘Speaking’ is dependent on both: a) the positionality of who articulates the speech, and b) the capability of the audience to understand the message as a statement. Regarding the difference of voice and speech, Rancière asserts in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009):

[T]he whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voices. For all time, the refusal to consider certain categories of people as political beings has proceeded by means of a refusal to hear the words exiting their mouths as discourse. (Rancière, 2009, p. 24)

‘Having a voice’—the capacity to utter sounds—and ‘being heard’—formulating an intelligible/audible speech—are two very different capacities. The former is in principle a biological capacity of all human beings, whereas the latter implies a hierarchical position from where one’s speech is enunciated and, most importantly, heard as intelligible speech. Being heard is not only an aural capacity, but rather the ‘affect’ of the uttered voice being perceived as discourse (intelligible) by its listeners.

Being in charge of ‘speaking’ consists on defining rules, rights and cultural frameworks from above (Rancière, 2009). In order to illustrate the difference between ‘having a voice’ and ‘speaking’, Rancière draws on the political dynamics of ancient Greek democracy. Plato stated that artisans have time for nothing but working. What Plato meant by ‘nothing’ was to not take part in the citizen’s assembly of ancient Greece’s democratic system. While artisans were made busy providing the needed resources for the sustainability of the city, only a minute fragment of the Athenian society could fully dedicate its time to another kind of production: the speech.

Drawing a comparison between the enunciation of the event and Rancière’s presentation of ancient Greek democracy, those who provide the fundamental

75 goods for society do not necessarily participate in the construction of its discourse, or in the ways in which it is regulated. The content of the laws is formulated by those that are entitled to speak and be heard. Discourse does not belong to every single being able to talk, but to an exclusive part of society. The moment of enunciation implies a structure that is hierarchically determined. The agency of domination does not reside in ‘who listens,’ but in the one ‘who speaks’.

In relation to Torre Bela film, some parallels between hierarchical structures of speaking and the agency of the director can be drawn. Although the film-crew did not provide a written script before the event, their presence in the field of exposures of the film is part of the ‘evental’ equation, as seen above. Despite invisible in the film, the team acted as the driving force in the creation of the event, directing the people so that the unfolding of the event appeared ‘naturally’ in front of the camera. The directions behind the camera and the means of image production create a privileged position of enunciation for the film-crew. The aesthetics of ‘what happen’ follow Harlan’s directions motivated by his previous experience in Chile and Soviet Union, and in the socialist ideology.

Fig. 8—Gathering in the public square in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still: 26’20’’

Harlan’s idea about the symbolic importance of taking over the palace, and how it would play a role in the dramatisation of the whole event was determinant for its happening. In order to encourage the squatters Harlan spent months in the farm and organised meetings between the army (MFA) and the workers, both in Lisbon and in Torre Bela estate. The director wanted to get the official permission to enter the property signed by the military in order to make sure that the occupation was not illegal. These moves encourage the population and, therefore, cannot be read outside of the configurations of the aesthetics of the moving images in the film. As mentioned by Harlan, what happened in Torre Bela was not premeditated by him and the crew, but it would never had happened otherwise either. Harlan declares in an interview with Cristoph Hübner that:

The big difference between this [Torre Bela] and what we could call a documentary style approach is that most of what happened would not have happened if we hadn’t been there…

Hence, we provoked the action and, like in the construction of a plot, the film did not come out of a script, but primarily, only reality. The reality was provoked, intentionally created; this was a reality that would not have otherwise existed. (Harlan in Costa 2011a, p. 115)

Harlan’s declarations disclose ‘who is speaking’ and the archive from here the film speaks. The event was ‘provoked’ and ‘created’ according to previous knowledge about other socialist revolutions, and this knowledge is the ‘speaker’ of the event. It determines how the event happens by drawing on the archive of the left and repeating its grammar in the Portuguese political framework.

Contrary to Badiou’s assertions, the quasi-script in Torre Bela, despite eventually emancipatory, further complicates the possibility of claiming ‘novelty’. Arguing that the production of the event is constituted outside the known order needs to be considered against the background of the regimes of enunciation and the

77 archive of the left at play in Torre Bela. What happens in Torre Bela is the presence of a quasi-already-written script (but still contingent) of other socialist struggles. In this way, the squatters’ performances are the ‘words’ and ‘gestures’ of the script in the process of being written.

The event cannot be decoupled from the aesthetics of political-cultural regimes of signification. Discourse circulates in systems of meaning that render them intelligible and govern what can be said, thought and seen. As it was noted by Michel Foucault in ‘The Historical A Priori and the Archive’ (2002a):

The positivity of a discourse—like that of Natural History, political economy, or clinical medicine—characterizes its unity throughout time, and well beyond individual oeuvres, books, and texts. This unity certainly does not enable us to say of Linnaeus of Buffon, Quesnay or Turgot, Broussais or Bichat, who told the truth, who reasoned with rigour, who most conformed to his own postulates; nor does it enable us to say which of these oeuvres was closest to a primary, or ultimate, destination, which would formulate most radically the general project of science. But what it does reveal is the extent to which Buffon and Linnaeus (or Turgot and Quesnay, Broussais and Bichat) were talking about ‘the same thing’, by placing themselves at ‘the same level’ or at opposing one another on ‘the same field of battle’ (…). (Foucault, 2002a, p. 142)

Foucault identifies the underlying structures—not subject to change in the turmoil of revolutions or inventions—that define limited spaces of communication and render other possibilities mute (or unintelligible). The positivity of discourse, or better said, the conditions of the enunciative function define a realm of formal identities, and thematic continuities that govern the structure of the ‘possibles’. (Foucault, 2002a, p. 143) Signalling the presence of the camera and the people behind it—as well as its intentions, ideologies and influence—exposes the new as an aesthetic manifestation also dependent on its formal identity—for instance, being interpreted as novelty. The documentation sets up the ‘new’ as a formal identity represented by the repetition of its signifying order.

The event is actualised as an integral component of a complex apparatus constituted by power structures, institutions, power relations, relations of knowledge and the tensions between the components involved (Foucault, 1977). To acknowledge the influence of the event’s moment of enunciation, its power structures and its space of (re)enactment is to set the event, not in a transcendental disruption, but rather in a repeating dynamic of event signification. This is to say that, a war and a revolution do not occur outside of a network of other instances, already manifold, and definitely not outside of their enunciation—‘saying’ the event—which highlights the important of one over many.

The apparatus of event formation renders signifying acts intelligible, obfuscates what it fails to recognise. However, ‘what it fails to recognise’ or the elements not formally identified as ‘what it is’ still take place during, after and before the event. The interrogation about the mechanisms of event construct discloses hierarchies, power structures and hegemonic orders; but not necessarily what is effaced by the event apparatus. One question remains: How to read what is left unattended by the event?

The ‘Non-Event’

The question of belief always enters critical writing and perhaps never more urgently than when one’s subject resists vision and may not be ‘really there’ at all. Like the fantasy of erotic desire which frames love, the distortions of forgetting which infect memories, and the blind spots laced through the visual field, a believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real. As a representation of the real the image is always, partially, phantasmatic. In doubting the authenticity of the image, one questions as well the veracity of she who makes and describes it. To doubt the subject seized by the eye is to doubt the subjectivity of the seeing ‘I’. These words work both to overcome and to deepen the provocation of that doubt. (Phelan, 1993, p. 1)

In her book Unmarked (1993), US American theorist Peggy Phelan elaborates on the ontology of performance in Western artistic practices. Phelan’s preoccupations are driven by the subjectivities that are left unframed in performance, but also by the impossibility to frame them by virtue of their unsayability. Phelan addresses a crucial aporia in performance: the disjunction between what performance does in the world of affects and subjectification—seen as novel forms of political subjectivity—and this disjunction being the reason why it can no longer be clearly described or interpreted. (Phelan, 1993)

Phelan argues that ‘performance used the body to frame the lack of ‘being’ promised by and through the body – that which cannot appear without a supplement.’ (Phelan, 1993, p. 155) In this way, the ‘lack of being’ can be seen as an entity that although it cannot be denied, it situates itself in an unknown and unnamable space of articulation. It sits on a site of being, though its specific location is unknown. To connect to the discussions above around discourse, what Phelan is trying to map are those affects which language did not capture yet. In other words, Phelan maps the non-intelligible affects of the event.

In order to think about this unrepresentable space, Phelan proposes the notion of the ‘unmarked’ at the site of a subjectivity and identity that are not visually representable. To acknowledge that not everything can be said and seen, sets forward the question of how to grasp these fleeting affects without formal identity—travelling between things, in being, etc. For Phelan, the notion of the blindspot gives an oblique answer to her question, since it circumscribes the ‘barely visible’ affects (despite its presence).

Phelan proposes the notion of ‘displacement’ as an attempt to grasp that which is not being encompassed by the frame. For instance, displacement is the shift that takes place when asking ‘who is behind the camera’ in Torre Bela. It allows to move from what is seen to what is left unseen. But the presence of the filmmaker is not the only way in which I see a displacement towards the blindspot of the film

80 and of the Portuguese Revolution during the PREC. The images of the occupation are not less intriguing.

In the occupation scene the squatters seem to behave with surprising ease, with no bravery, heroism, and boldness. Instead their gestures are rather driven by bashfulness and genuine curiosity. For a popular upheaval one would expect that its images coincided more with uprisings known for their brutality, violence and— Badiou would say—passion. From the storming of the bastille in Paris in 1789, to the October revolution32—uprisings look bold, determined and revolutionary. In the context of the Portuguese Revolution, we could also recall the occupation of Carmo Square (Praça do Carmo) in Lisbon, by the military (armed and in tanks), and followed by hundreds of people on the day of the Carnation Revolution – 25th April 1974. Taken by surprise the president of the council, Marcelo Caetano, and the rest of the government members were forced to withdraw and leave the country.33

The seeming lack of congruency between the highpoint of the revolutionary occupation and its representation constitutes another ‘displacement’ in the reading of the revolutionary blindspots. The interval between imagery (signifier) and signified, is where, in my understanding, stands the newness of the Torre Bela uprising. The break of the normativity in the case of Torre Bela is not the occupation—as Badiou would claim—but the way in which the occupation fails to represent the emergence of an emancipatory newness, by being rather quiet and bashful. This ‘failure’ exposes the event as a cultural and historical construction; and its systems of foundations based on systems of meanings.

The optical (behind the camera) and aesthetic (imagery, discursive, political) blindspot of Torre Bela opens the singular event to a multiplicity of other occurrences—to an unframed and unrepresentable flux of affects. To displace the focal point of the event to the behind the camera and the mismatch between revolution and its representation, discloses not one occupation—the heroic

32 The October revolution was re-enacted for October: The Ten Days That Chocked The World (1928) directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein. 33 Marcelo Caetano lived in exile in Brasil until his death.

81 occupation stemming out of popular demands for a more just society and labour conditions—but a multiplicity of micro events—in the form of the film-crew, Harlan’s ambitions, the curiosity of the squatters, Torre Bela’s filmic strategies of representation, my affective relation to it in 2016, and many others.

The singular event gives space to a plurality of elements that only resonate beyond the event’s declamatory apparatus. To ‘suspend’ the apparatus and its framed reality is to enter the conceptual space designated by Peggy Phelan (1993), the space of the ‘unmarked’, or, as I want to claim, of the ‘non-event’. The ‘non-event’ is not intended to signify an absence of an occurrence, nor a static moment. The ‘non-event’ instead aims to circumscribe the intervals that are not taken into account when the hierarchy of the event: a) emerges out of a network of occurrences, and b) establish a tendentious governance of the possible—i.e., through imagery and discourse.

The ‘non-event’ is not a term under which occurrences might be identified, but a figure that emerges out of the problematisation of the monolithic event, and through which one can evade a binary understanding of occurrences. For instance: bigger or smaller, more or less important events. ‘Non-event’ sits in a double bind and a contradictory movement. On the one hand, it enacts a critical positionality towards the event, setting its discourse into perspective with other non-events taking place and undoing event’s hierarchy. On the other hand, it interrogates the redistribution of systems of event production; its regimes of enunciation, representation, and power structures.

The non-event emerges out of a position that sets the event into perspective by ‘over-exposing’ mechanisms of its constitution. As pointed out by Gilles Deleuze in the essay ‘What is a Dispositif?’, normative readings of what is being exposed can be intersected by lines of flight that ‘turn [the event] back on itself, work on itself and affect itself’ (Deleuze, 1992, 161). In doing so, the event is undone in its declamatory capacity, which allows to investigate what is being hidden by its apparatus. The non-event reveals a series of ‘underflows’ of the event. Not

82 recognised by the optical and discursive apparatus, the ‘underflows’ exceed the meaning of event without signifying.

The underflows are the surplus of a signifying term; the ones that sit on the bottom or the underlevels of a term. The surplus manifestations that are not totally circumscribe by the signified remains untouched. To use a metaphor to better explain, ‘underflow’ is when water overflows its container, but upside down; i.e., water underflows its container from the bottom. Instead of exceeding over and above—as a full glass—the refuses rather flow from the bottom; remaining unaccountable. They are the non-dramatic gestures that take place without declaring themselves to be gestures within the confines of the event.

The ‘non-event’ cannot do without the event and does not aim to repair it either. The tie to the event is of a parasitical nature, in the sense that it exists in the interstices of the event in order to introduce disorder into the notion and operations of the event.34 35 To emerge out of a set of arguments exposed in relation to event mechanisms and power structures, ‘non-event’ does not replace the ‘event’. Far from being a mere category; the non-event is a theoretical term that helps to address occurrences that do not fall under the mechanisms of a declamatory event and its system of signification.

Conclusion

Chapter One devises an investigation about the occupation scene of Torre Bela as a way to shed light on the surplus of the declamatory event in the Portuguese Revolution. The presence of Harlan behind the camera and his ideology inscribe the event in a set of already scripted actions and systems of meanings: for instance, ‘the archive of the left’. However, the figure of the ‘non-event’ provides insights

34 The parasitical (parasite) nature of the non-event contrasts with the ‘site of the event’ argued by Badiou, in order to transcend a univocal space and time into a multidirectional and multi-layered instance. 35 Writing about ‘critique,’ French philosopher Jacques Derrida (2001) argues that one cannot do without the logics that one tries to criticise. Assuming this situation and without claiming any exteriority, the non-event enacts a more complex network of occurrences, that erodes the instituted hierarchies set by the event and shifts perspectives away from quantitative and qualitative adjectives and categories.

83 into the exhibitionary field of occurrences that are not framed by the event’s aesthetics and power structures; and provokes an oblique entry point to the underpinning logics of the event. Additionally, the proposed term undermines the singularity of the event and opens it up to a swarm of already manifold occurrences. Instead of singular, events encompass intentional and unintentional exposures (intangible relationships) always already taking place in the field of occurrences.

In the following chapter, I will make use of the conceptual space opened up by the non-event. Acknowledging the expanded field of exposures allows to reflect on the unrepresented ‘gazes’ of/on the revolution present in Torre Bela. Chapter Two explores the aesthetic relationships between the audience of the revolution and its participants within the limits and power relations of the scopic regime of the film. Drawing on the notion of ‘gaze’, the scopic regime of the film is investigated as a relationship (or interplay of exposures) into which one enters when realising that one is an object of other’s sight. Wilson Filipe (the main protagonist among the squatters) holds the secret desire of becoming a professional actor in Europe after the shooting of Torre Bela. His secret gaze and desire drives his eloquent performance in Torre Bela—performing for the camera and conveying the film crew’s directions. His performance sheds light on the unfolding of hidden gestures and performances that take place in the making of the event, but are yet unrepresented in its linear narrative.

Chapter Two explores how Wilson’s confession undermines the claims for objectivity and for realism within the scopic rhetoric of the film. Through the scopic regime, Torre Bela is analysed in its exhibitionary capacity, hence, squatters being exhibited by the camera apparatus as subjects of a revolutionary process that is ‘given-to-be-seen’. The unrepresented gazes of those being exhibited sets up the occupation on a stage of interplays between roles, representation and drama. If Chapter One is grounded on the ‘invisible’ space of Torre Bela (behind the camera), then Chapter Two treats regimes of visuality in the process of a construction of the ‘real’ and its dramatisation.

VISUAL ESSAY ONE

The Occupation Scene

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The Occupation Scene in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video Stills: 80’-89’

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It was really a very simple and strange story. I made a film in the Islands of Cape Verde. So this is an archipelago off the coast of Senegal. I had the idea, for my second film, to do (it was a stupid idea) a remake of a film I love. And I still like it a lot. The film is called I Walk With a Zombie. It is a film directed by French American Jacques Tourneur in 1943. My idea was to do a remake of it. I didn’t have any more ideas. I had a producer and I said: ‘I want to go far away and do a film in Africa’. So I went and did a film that, in the end, is not a remake of I Walk With a Zombie. I fell in love with that place and the people. The film I made was Casa de Lava [1994]. It has perhaps a more documentary side to it. I shot a lot the people in the villages, and the villages itself. I left a little aside the written part, the text as a guidance.

When we finished, a lot of people working with us and that knew we were coming back to Lisbon gave me presents to give to their people, their relatives, living in Portugal. Cape-Verdeans are a great immigrant community in Portugal. They are roughly 400.000. Essentially, they sent coffee, tobacco, and a lot of letters. So I arrived in Portugal with this bag full of stuff to be returned to their relatives. They lived in Fontaínhas, a slum just outside Lisbon. And because I had this bag and I spoke creole—I had to learn to make the film in Cape Verde [Casa de Lava]—I was accepted in the neighbourhood. Also, and more importantly, because I brought news, smells, and flavours from their homeland, made me immediately one of them. I stayed and was invited to stay to Sunday and Monday, to parties and dinners. So I stayed. And I said to myself: ‘Probably this is my place’.

Back then I was not happy with the films I was doing. Not the films themselves, but the way I was living them, in short, the life of filmmaking. So I said perhaps this is the place. And that is how I met the community. I knew I liked the faces, the people, the sounds, and the music. And now I am thinking that perhaps the letters, I helped bring to them, are a kind of metaphor for what I am doing now in film. I brought the

36 Passage of transcribed interview and Q&A with Pedro Costa conducted by Laura Mulvey for the première of Horse Money in London, ICA, 18th September, 2015.

107 news written in the letters, but I still do not know what they say. So this became a kind of metaphor to me. In some way, it is the origin of every film. It does not apply to my films only. I believe that all films are like this to me. All good films are like letters you don’t know what is written in them. There is only the closed envelop and the face receiving and reading them. And all you can read is the face… you don’t read the text.

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CHAPTER TWO

Wilson’s Dream of Becoming an Actor and the ‘Exhibitionary Complex’ in Torre Bela

Introduction

(…) it is difficult to deny that the visual has been dominant in modern western culture in a wide variety of ways. Whether we focus on ‘the mirror of nature’ metaphor in philosophy with Richard Rorty or emphasise the prevalence of surveillance with Michel Foucault or we mean the society of the spectacle with Guy Debord, we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era. (Jay, 1994, p. 3)

What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes. (Deleuze, 1993, p. 76)

This chapter continues the investigation of the aesthetic manifestations of the Portuguese Revolution through the making of the event in Torre Bela. Chapter Two leaves the space ‘behind’ the camera—as investigated in Chapter One—and focuses on the scopic space of the event generated by the optic apparatus: the monocular ‘eye’ of the camera. As a device, the camera captures the movements and performances of the partakers, gesturing towards the gaze of the camera and the squatters’ awareness of the interplay of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’. According to Tony Bennett (1995), the gaze of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ is foundational for the formation of social- and self-regulation of those subjected to viewing. The

109 interplay between gazes establishes the space of the exhibition as a set of displays that surveys and self-regulates the audience.

Drawing on the ‘exhibitionary complex’ and its relation to the space of the gaze, this chapter analyses the ‘in-front-of-the-camera’ in Torre Bela in its exhibitionary capacities. Focusing on the gaze of the camera, I argue that Torre Bela’s participants are both subjects on display and of viewing. Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1977) complexifies the gaze by distinguishing between the eye’s look and the gaze. In Jacques Lacan’s later work, the gaze is not what one holds and uses, but refers to an atmospheric relation established by realising that one is seen and being seen. The projection of the gaze is not dependant on the presence of a viewer, as proposed by the panoptic model of control. Gaze is a scopic and social relationship established by the realisation of (eventually) being watched and that informs modes of social- and self-(re)presentation (Lacan, 1977).

The investigation of the space of the gaze in Torre Bela and its exhibitionary qualities will open up to the ways in which the cinematic gaze generates constraints and possibilities in the performance of those acting in front of the camera—i.e., the squatters. Analysing the atmospheric space of the gaze and how they forge levels of representation on the stage of the political, I aim to complicate the directionality of the gaze of the camera and contest its determinism in the performance of those under the ‘monocular eye’.

There is a paradox at play in the process of shooting the revolution. On the one hand, the camera empowers those being recorded; on the other hand, the gaze of the camera can also be seen as interiorised surveillance and, hence, as self- regulating those participating in the revolution. The apparatus of recording inaugurates an encounter between something that may already be there—the revolutionary potential and claims for occupation—and something that is ‘already written’ by the code of what documentary truth and revolutionary images look like and how they are perceived. In this case, ‘the code of what is’ informs the aesthetic manifestations whereby the revolution comes about, namely, the acting out of an inherent and inherited script. In a sense that follows Deleuze’s epigraph, our

110 inquiry asks what are the capacities of the screen (here, also the cinematic screen) that appears in this chaotic multiplicity to read the occasion as event.

Drawing on the space of the gaze as an atmospheric relation to the awareness of seeing and being seen, this chapter is divided into three parts. First, it analyses the limitations and the power relations of the scopic regimes used in the filming and montage of Torre Bela. Second, I introduce my experience of visiting Torre Bela estate in the winter of 2015 to undo the feeling of scopophilic domination in the film. Third, the ‘in-front-of-the-camera’ is where the space of the gaze and its scenic representation sets off, which allows us to read the non-visible representations and desires of the revolutionary process. These three instances investigate the layers of ‘representation’ in the seeming ‘presentation’ of the seizing of power in front of the camera. In this analysis, I look at other occurrences happening on the edges of the event (or of the making-sense of the event) that allows for a multiplicity of reflections that expand beyond the immediate objectives of the revolutionary drive. In this context, I will consider Wilson’s secret gaze and my presence in Torre Bela estate in 2015.

Addressing the space of representation as a site of dispute and marginal layers will allow the present thesis to tackle barely accountable aspects of the squatters’ performances in the documentation process—a process that I believe is crucial for a critical unravelling of the event of the revolution and for tackling its barely signifying occurrences. The secret desire of Wilson Filipe (the most prominent squatter—hereafter Wilson) to become an actor after the shooting of Torre Bela disrupts the space of representation of the event. I will argue that performing under the cinematic gaze, Wilson’s secret desire disrupts the event’s documentation, disclosing the intentional dramatisation of the occupation in the film to fulfil his own narcissistic projection. Fantasy, multiplicity of screen, and secret desire account for the redistribution of senses and politics beyond the emancipatory claim of the revolution.

Wilson’s desire helps to undermine the scopophilic power of the documentation to a) convey the complexities at play in the revolution and to b) bear the

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‘impression of authenticity’ (Nichols, 1991, p. 150). Wilson’s dramatic performance in Torre Bela is driven not only by his ideology, but also by his desire to leave Portugal altogether and become a famous actor abroad—‘in Europe’ (Wilson in Red Line, 2011b). Wilson’s performance responds to the urge for dramatisation requested by the film crew, but also overcomes this initial intension. Wilson’s secret gaze unfolds performativity in unexpected ways under the spectrum of those who own the means of production of the film.

In order to investigate the space of representation under regimes of visuality, this chapter goes back to Torre Bela. The argument is based on the ‘same’ audio-visual material and, this time, specifically, in the first scene of the film. Repeating the same material does not attempt to provide an analytical and systematic reading of Torre Bela, but rather to gesture towards the inexhaustibility of readings provided and provoked by the material. Repetition as a method intends to propose a protocol of readership that allows for a continuous layering of problems and entry points capable of fostering new modes of engagement.

In the context of this dissertation, ‘to insist’ enacts attempts to engage with the not-yet-lived afterlives of the event and its modalities of production in seemingly non-related ways. One of the urgencies that drives my inquiry is touched by an attempt to map the complexities of affects of the Portuguese post-revolutionary present. This attempt is inscribed beyond any fetishisation of the Portuguese Revolution, regardless of its virtues and failures. Difficult to tackle due to its naturalisation (i.e., acritically internalised readings), affects of the post- revolutionary present require a repetitive insistence capable of engaging differently and reading beyond hegemonic logics. The continuous and repetitive gesture of reading provides a multi-layered understanding of effaced and surplus affects—i.e., the underflows hidden in the sublevels of the event.

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The first scene of the documentary film Torre Bela shows an aerial view of the property of Duke of Lafões, a member of the House of Braganza, part of the Portuguese royal family. From above, installed in a helicopter, the camera records the road that connects the main gate of Torre Bela estate to the palace—the aristocratic mansion situated in the middle of the property used by the descendants of the royal family as the country mansion of their private hunting grounds. The same house which the former workers, a few months later, occupy and turn into headquarters of their cooperative.

The aerial shot is in 1975, one year after the Carnation Revolution (25th April 1974). When Thomas Harlan flies over the property, the occupation has not yet taken place. However, when the camera looks from above, the revolutionary process is already happening—a process that frees ‘Portugal from dictatorship, oppression and colonialism [and] was a revolutionary change and the beginning of an historic turning point for Portuguese society.’ (Constitution of the Portuguese Republic Seventh Revision, 2005, p. 10) As discussed in the previous chapter, over the course of two years, this process is meant to help establish new fundamental principles based on a democratic political system and a freer, more just and more solidary society (2005, p. 11).

Portugal lives the tumultuous and ground breaking aftermath of the decline of the longest dictatorship in Europe, which ruled the country from 1928 to 1974. In the Spring of 1975, and in the context of the Land Reform, the former agricultural wage labourers from adjacent villages who used to work for Duke of Lafões and to other landowners in neighbouring farms, and the veterans of the Portuguese colonial wars37, are about to attempt an occupation of the land and the palace.

Occupations and expropriations of land and properties in the hands of aristocratic landowners took place all across the country after the decline of the dictatorship

37 When the revolution happened the colonial wars in Africa were at one of its bloodiest moments. One of the main claims of the military coup was the withdrawn of the Portuguese troops from the African colonies and their consequent independence. From the revolution day until the final independence of the African colonies in 1975, the Portuguese troops returned to Portugal in different phases. In their early twenties, the militaries were sympathetic with the socialist claims of the revolution and the agrarian reform. Some of these young men joined the struggle of the people in the rural.

113 ruled by Antonio Oliveira Salazar.38 However, in contrast to similar occurrences across the country, the political and social movement that took place in Torre Bela was not backed up or instigated by any political party. Rather, it came out of popular organisation and the will of people who had been oppressed for generations under the long-standing aristocratic landlords of Torre Bela. Known for being the only independent and popular upheaval to occur during the Portuguese Revolution, the occupation of the Torre Bela estate is considered unique.

When Harlan arrives to Portugal, the negotiations in Torre Bela are only starting. Portuguese researcher and filmmaker José Filipe Costa—who also directed Red Line (2011b), a documentary exploring the making of Torre Bela and authored Cinema Forges the Event Filmmaking and the Case of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela, a remarkable investigation on Harlan’s role in this process (2012)—gives a general description of the state of affairs in Torre Bela upon Harlan’s arrival:

The events of 23 April 1975 at Torre Bela were the culmination of a process that had included a series of effort and meetings promoted by Wilson amongst the population of the villages of Manique and Maçussa. Almost all the residents of the surrounding villages had been directly or indirectly linked to the estate in the past. Many adolescents had begun their working lives there. Others had relatives who sustained their households thanks to salaries earned from the estate. The Torre Bela estate had a prominent place in the region’s geography and landscape. From some points in these villages or the surrounding lands, the roughly 17 km long boundary wall that surrounded Torre Bela had a great impact on the visual field of anyone who sought to penetrate its limits. (Costa, 2012, p. 17 [my emphasis])

The density of the property and its impact in the surrounding landscape stressed in Costa’s passage stands out. For those who lived on the premises or happened to

38 António Oliveira Salazar was in power from 1928 to 1968, being followed by Marcelo Caetano, who governed the country from 1968 to 1974—up until the revolution of 25th April.

114 be passing by, Torre Bela’s estate wall was a great barrier, a high and long wall that was impossible to trespass—except for those who worked for Lafões’s family. This lack of access made its interior spaces unknown to the majority of the people, and this interior space can be understood as a sort of great unknown inner-content that solidifies and mystifies the spatial arrangement of the estate’s power.

Fig. 9—Aerial shot of Torre Bela’s main gate. Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

Harlan arrived at Torre Bela in the early Spring of 1975 when, a few days after the uprising, the people were striving to negotiate with the Duke of Lafões. The term of the dispute was accessibility. First, they claimed for access to the means of production and, second, to the land, based on a prerogative for a more sustainable use of the one thousand and seven hundred hectares. The daily-waged workers

115 were calling for expanded uses of arable lands, increased agricultural employment in the region, and for the return of the land to those who have dedicated their lives to it. According to the numbers cited in the brochure published on the occasion of the first anniversary of the occupation of the estate, only eight out of the overall hectares were used for agricultural purposes before the revolution (Costa, 2012, p. 17).

As we have seen in the previous chapter, although the negotiations had already started upon Harlan arrival, the occupation of the palace happened thanks to Harlan’s encouragement—on both a practical and political level. Considering Harlan’s intervention, one could say that he is an active participant in the break of the event, as much as he is a documentarian; both an actor and an orchestrator. Harlan fosters and creates a new situation that reconfigures what can be done/said/thought, and the roles, spaces and possibilities that emerge under a condition of change. Reading Harlan’s participation in line with French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s thoughts, one could say that Harlan contributes to the re-distribution of the sensible during the course of the Portuguese Revolution (2004).

Recalling Deleuze’s claim that ‘events are produced […] but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes’ (1992, p. 76), we can argue for Harlan an active mediation on the construction of the event; he can be read as a catalyst for the intervention of the screen of the event. What I mean here is that Harlan not only probes and films the situation, but also inserts himself in the arrangement of the surface (both screen and state of affairs) in which the revolution is ‘projected’ (in both a metaphoric and literal sense)—i.e., a polysemy of screen in film and event.

The memories of Torre Bela’s event are also entangled with the images projected/produced/fostered in Harlan’s film. Even though one could argue that the event was already in the process of being made when the crew arrived (on 23rd April 1975), what the squatters recall when asked about the ‘occupation of Torre Bela’, forty years later, are the events shown in the film (Costa, 2011b). The

116 memories of those involved can no longer be dissociated from the image of the film39. The intervention of the screen is as much a part of the conjuncture of the revolution as it is its outcome and its reflection (Deleuze, 1992).

Still to this day, the images and actions generated by the presence of the filmmaker and his crew are part of the collective memory of the revolutionary process in Portugal. In turn, the materiality of the film—filming, montage and final cut—functions as an entry point to the means of both representation and exhibition of the event. This is why making inquiries into the scopic regimes of the ‘making’ and ‘montage’ of the film are fundamental to the investigation of the aesthetics of the (revolutionary) novelty. For this reason, in the next section, I probe the limitations and power relations in the scopic rhetoric and style used in Torre Bela through the first scene of the film.

The All-Encompassing View of Torre Bela

The film starts with a 2’25’’ long shot in which the camera flies over Torre Bela following a clay road that connects the main gate of the estate and the palace. From above, the film introduces the viewer to the stage to the events of the following hour and a half, i.e., the gated Torre Bela estate. The aerial view is followed by a soundtrack disguising the noise of the aircraft from where Harlan films. When the camera crosses the gate, there are people on the ground who wave back at the helicopter. They are the members of the picket managing the property’s entrance, staying over day and night.

This scene reflects Harlan’s access to Torre Bela. The aerial access to the property informs the way in which Harlan and his crew ‘access’ the property and the unfolding of the events. The first scene in Torre Bela quite literally provides the viewer with an overview of the visual field where the scene is going to take place; it

39 José Filipe Costa’s Red Line (2011b) approaches the construction of memory as a volatile and never ending process. The materiality of film and its physical manipulation is shown in Red Line as a way to associate the fabrication of narratives through the manipulation of the visual apparatus, with the inevitable connection between the memories of the participants in Torre Bela and what is shown in Harlan’s film.

117 is an optical recognition of that which needs to be acknowledged as a whole and which is then accessed through its particularities—i.e., characters, events, meetings, encounters, discussions, everyday routines of the participants of the occupation. Although this view point might sound common in film’s visual rhetorics—the visual effects used by filmmakers to convey their ideas—I argue that filming from the aircraft, in the context of Torre Bela, shows a privileged standpoint and portrays Harlan’s totalising accessibility to the narrative (what happens and how it happens).

Fig. 10—Aerial shot of Torre Bela estate. Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

To delve into the first scene of Torre Bela is a way to investigate the feeling of scopophilic power of the all-encompassing view. This omniscient perspective subordinates the whole world to the gaze of the viewer—in the case of Torre Bela,

118 the audience is the central European intellectual elite that out of solidarity joined the Portuguese struggle in 1975 and the attendees of Cannes Festival in 1977. In order to better unravel the dilemma of the bird’s-eye view, I take stock of Michel de De Certeau’s mapping of the contrasts and valences of the aerial perspective. De Certeau addresses this issue in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and most notably in the third chapter. He seems to share some preoccupations with Harlan bird’s-eye view. By focusing on the optical apparatus—vision—and what it offers, De Certeau describes his view from the top floor of the World Trade Center in New York City:

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide – extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space. (De Certeau, 1984, p. 91)

De Certeau’s aerial view over the spatial arrangement of New York City, very much like Harlan’s take, immerses the viewer in an omniscient and omnipresent gaze. De Certeau embodies the bird’s-eye view and visually navigates the city from above, mapping its different neighbourhoods, its geographic position, and the movements of its passers-by. His eyes move along the immense territory, from the top of the island to the financial district where the World Trade Centre is located. De Certeau’s invocation of a texturology of coincidential extremes between being on the top floor and walking in the street signposts the problematics of distanced looking. The argument here is not one that celebrates the new vantage point, but one that underscores its limitations. More than rehearsing the ambition of rendering everything visible, De Certeau’s description unpacks the relationships

119 between knowledge and power inscribed in the seemingly all-encompassing view from a higher point of perspective.

By looking at Manhattan from above, De Certeau underscores the fascination prompted by such a gaze. In order to understand what is being perceived and acknowledged from above in comparison to ‘walking in the street,’ De Certeau asks a crucial question: ‘To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong?’ (De Certeau, 1984, p. 92). By enouncing ‘the erotics of knowledge’—as a sensuous mode of experiencing, detached from the everyday perspective—De Certeau shifts towards an understanding of the vantage point as a source of pleasure and ecstatic contemplation afforded by ‘seeing the whole’ from above.

Viewing the city from its highest point counters one’s normative and daily perspective. Our everyday view, for instance, as pedestrians walking in the street, could be instead described as fragmented and limited when compared to De Certeau’s description. Sitting on the top floor of the WTC gives one a feeling of accessibility understood as a hubris of ‘access’—even if it is exclusively visual. This view holds recognition and acknowledgment of the territory and its passers-by— or ‘users’, to use De Certeau’s preferred term—with the advantage of the subject of the gaze not being seen. This last point denotes the importance of the optics of power, in which the act of seeing from above is entangled in an uneven power dynamic and relations.40

The power relation to what is under the gaze is not the only reason that produces the ecstatic enchantment of the bird’s-eye view of skyscrapers. In another account, De Certeau asserts that being on the top floor also interrupts our everyday perception of the visual landscape, not only because we can (arguably) see everything, but also because there is a divorce between seeing and being seen (De

40 Considering financial districts in metropolis across the world, skyscrapers are a ubiquitous presence. As a representation of financial and political power, these buildings usually open the top floor to the public, providing the best viewings over the city to dwellers or tourists willing to pay for the ‘exclusive’ perspective. In London, the recently launched Shard provides the highest view of the city. It is advertised as ‘The only place to see all of London, all at once from the tallest building in the European Union’ and tickets can be bought online for £30. (The Shard, n.d.)

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Certeau, 1984). This disruption in being an object of viewing is ultimately the vehicle for the power dynamic in question and highlights the traits of exhibition present in the space of the gaze—for instance, the objects being displayed or exposed to the audience, who, in its turn, looks from a distanced gaze.

Torre Bela’s initial scene indirectly speaks to the view described by De Certeau. The camera provides a great view over the ‘exhibition venue’ of the film (the estate) and their participants (the squatters). Harlan’s sitting in the helicopter can be likened to De Certeau’s sitting on the top of the World Trade Center; both have access to a privileged perspective, an all-encompassing view of ‘the world to be known’, which is not necessarily shared with those on the ground—be it the squatters of the Torre Bela estate or the ‘users’ of the urban space in NYC. In this way, what the aerial view brings to the construction of the narrative portrayed in Torre Bela is a distanced single eye—Cartesian reference (Descartes, 1968)—that observes reality from above and, arguably, without intervening in the usage of the space and the taking place of the revolutionary event. Harlan’s gaze (in the filming and in the montage of the film) comprehends a singular perspective of the whole.

As it has been argued in Chapter One, Torre Bela employs an approach that differs from most of the militant films that were shot in the same period in the context of the revolutionary process (PREC) in Portugal. Torre Bela does not use common tropes present in militant cinema, such as captioning and voiceovers that reflect on something that has happened, nor does it use testimonial registers like interviews or statements. We could argue that Harlan moves capture a more ‘naturalistic’ flow of actions—the revolution as it unfolds—and the use of visual tropes that suggest a neutral and distanced positionality. How can we read the use of this style and rhetoric in the burst of the new political order?

‘The Return of the [Deployed] Real’41

41 This title is a rephrase of the book title Return of the Real by Hal Foster (1996).

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Almost fifty years of dictatorship established a totalitarian governance of aesthetic regimes in Portugal. The distribution of the sensible under Salazarism was controlled by an absolute authority substantiated in censorship, control of the press, maintenance of the privileged classes (aristocracy and church), and persecution of political and ideological opposition to the regime. After the fall of the regime, the social imagery was in need of uncensored images, information, sources, and new narratives that could feed people’s imaginary of the new order to come.

As part of the political and ideological strategy of the country, Salazar exploited and manipulated access to the real situation, by confusing information with national myths, and deploying sophisticated media and effects to disperse attention to the extant modalities of oppression that the regime installed locally and transnationally—for instance, the propaganda of the colonial war (1961- 1974)42. Regarding national myths there are many examples: a) the resurrection of the narrative of the Discovery from the fifteenth century; b) the grandiose ‘deeds’ of Portuguese monarchs and mythical national figures; c) the reverence of the Portuguese imperial project; and d) the reinforcement of a foundational myth (Cardão, 2015). Salazar’s propaganda was widely spread out over the people’s imaginary, national identity, education syllabus, and official narratives populating all forms of the symbolic order.43

42 The brand new edition of Portuguese News (Jornal Português) (2015) in DVD compiles TV news broadcasted in the Portuguese public channel between February 1938 and mid-1951 , produced by Portuguese Society of Cinematographic Actualities (Sociedade Portuguesa de Actualidades Cinematográficas), and commissioned by the Ministry of National Propaganda. The series of daily TV news, of ten minutes each, were part of Estado Novo’s project of using the means of cinema for propaganda. The Portuguese News covers the period between official visits of Salazar to the former African colonies. 43 The colonial project was not exclusively Salazarist. When Salazar was first appointed to occupy a political post during the 1st Republic, the colonial project had been a reality for more than four hundred years. For this reason, stating that the celebration of the imperial Portuguese project was cherished only during the dictatorship is inaccurate. Nevertheless, its reinforcement and presence in the cultural and political programme of the fascist regime is unquestionable. For further details on the cultural programme during Estado Novo see: França, J. A., 2004. História de Arte em Portugal: o modernismo. Lisboa. Editorial Presença. One of the biggest cultural celebrations of Portuguese imperialism is the Exhibition of the Portuguese World (Exposição do Mundo Português) in 1940. The international exhibition was organized to celebrate the foundation of Portugal in 1140, the restoration of independence from Spain in 1640, and the Estado Novo regime.

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The common imagery provided very little resources on which to draw from and build the new image of the political and social transformation of the country. Even those who could remember the political regime previous to Salazarism could not foresee what the socialist revolution was going to bring to the country, and how it could change or not change the general political situation. In this way, the new era was a quasi tabla rasa in need of a renovation of what was known in all levels of social and political life. By this I mean that right after the 25 April linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions and the principles of the law (given the state of exception of the PREC) were in a stage of almost (quasi) non-written discourse and imagery. In other words, one could assert that the symbolic order was still on its way to respond to the local necessities, claims, urges and freedoms.

French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1994), in writing about the imagery of post-dictatorial societies, argues that after fascism people suffered from a loss of the real, and in order to compensate, society fetishised the period prior to this loss—i.e. the period of fascism. Baudrillard’s admittedly provocative claim helps to explain the increase in the flux of images that circulated in the public sphere after Nazism, Italian Fascism, Salazarism, and Franquism were overthrown, which bore witness to the atrocities of the various forms of European fascism.

Baudrillard’s (1994) analysis goes further than simply stating a seeming loss of the real; he argues that the liberal regimes that follow fascism fostered, for the first time, ‘reality’ (and the spectacle of the real) as a principle and an idea to be substantiated. This claim is grounded on an artificial separation between access and non-access to real facts, which during fascism is based on an intermingling between the atrocities of the regime and mythologised propaganda. Entertaining the conception of a representable ‘real’ aimed to form an opposition to the illusion and sense of ‘irreality’ sustained by the dictatorships.

One can read Harlan’s use of tropes of ‘realism’ in his film as a way to recuperate the lost reality and counter the absence of images during fascism. His decision to render his presence and the technology at hand invisible reflects his attempt to

123 deliver a persuasive and realistic portrait of the occupation to the viewer; and a way to bring to the people the images of their own history. In Harlan’s case it happens at the expense of providing entry points to his participation and involvement in the course of the Torre Bela’s events.

The aerial scene, the invisibility of the mechanical eye and its crew, and the long sequences operate as aesthetic and narrative tropes that resonate with culturally constructed senses of realism. However, it is interesting to note that by referencing such techniques in the field of documentary film, Harlan counters the tendencies used, in the same period, in militant and essay films44. Militant film openly manipulates narrative and uses delusional tropes that free the viewer from the fascination of ‘reality’. For instance, the visibility given to the filmmaker as interviewer and the audibility of voiceovers in militant films impose a pedagogical discourse. The film crew and their ideology are visible and audible to the audience. Contrary to Torre Bela, in militant cinema the so-called ‘manipulation’ or narritivisation is rendered perceptible. Therefore, militant film genre provides the access to the means of image production at the service of the political message.

Harlan’s investment in (re)presentation is rather different. There is an attempt to seek a sense of the ‘real’ as the aerial view in Torre Bela suggests; in the positionality of seeing from above and erasing Harlan’s presence from the framed images, the power structure between those seeing and those being seen emerges. The bird’s-eye view gives a sense of authority to the representation of the ‘reality’ below. The authority of imposing a layer of realism over the unfolding of the events is, for the US American art theorist Hal Foster, framed within the fear of the loss of reality.

Faced with this loss, our culture resurrects—morbidly, hysterically—archaic forms (…) in order to recover at least the image of authority of a sense of the real. (Foster, 1985, p. 84)

44 See Chapter One for more details about critical film production that questions the attempt to render the camera invisible in documentary film in Latin America. Two examples are Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina notion of porno-miseria (poverty-porn) and Glauber Rocha notion of estética da fome (aesthetic of hunger).

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Instead of looking forward, the feeling of the loss of the real tends to reach back to ‘archaic forms’. In other words, what seems to happen in the orchestration of the film is a tendency to fall back to an ‘archaic’ grammar of leftist struggles, of which the example of the occupation seen in the previous chapter is a good example.

Drawing from Harlan’s ideology and previous experience, the unfolding of micro- events on the ground expose (in multiple affects) themselves to a grammar that was ‘already written’ and constructed by the code of what documentary truth looks like.45 To impose an old grammar over the course of the events is to render Torre Bela a taking place of a ‘simulated reality, a total illusion, a set of effects that consumes the primary event’. (Foster, 1985, p. 80) The ‘primary event’ is the one that would have eventually taken place and that is transformed when captured by the manipulation and presence of the cinematic apparatus or the spectacle of realism. Without providing entry points to its manipulation, Torre Bela operates under an intense fascination with the hypperreal, and with the ‘reality image’ to which there is no way out.

In order to add another register to the visual presentation offered by Harlan in the introduction to the film I would like to entertain a recent episode that took place in the same premises. When looking at how Harlan smoothly crossed the 17 km long wall by flying over it, I cannot help but think on my own experience when I first visited the property on 13 February 2015. Contrary to Harlan’s experience, I did

45 Although I do not want to debate the category of Torre Bela in documentary film, it is important to acknowledge the thought-provoking debate between cinema theorists and critics around the documentary modes of representation. For instance, Nichols Bill defined four modes being: expository, observational, interactive and reflective. The expository uses the voice over to present information about the historical world as anew in a didactic fashion. The observational arose from the dissatisfaction of the moralising expository mode and implied a disciplined detachment from the events. The interactive engages with the subjects of the film in a more direct way and the filmmaker participates in the events. Finally, the reflexive mode is what can also be called meta-documentary film, where the conventions of representation are challenged and at the same time the matter of the film itself. The latter is the only one that challenges the impression of reality, whereas the other three normally conveyed unproblematically. (Bills, 1991; Burton, 1990)

125 not access Torre Bela by helicopter. Instead, I drove from my hometown to the Ribatejo region to visit Torre Bela on a winter day. Now, this is Portugal in 2015, forty years after the only socialist revolution in Europe, which overthrew the longest standing dictatorial regime in the West, took place.

On my way to Torre Bela, I revisited the old road from my hometown to Lisbon before the new highway was built with the support of structural funding of the European Union in the early 2000’s—the inclusion of Portugal in the EU is part of the post-PREC movement to introduce the country in a capitalist market economy. The old road reminds me of how much of my life was lived in a restructured country and how many of these changes, including all-accessible public education, a more just society and a strong welfare state, were grounded on the urgency of a new political system based on a socialist dream.46

Upon arrival, I first drove around the wall that circumscribes the property. Next, I started looking for the entrance—to seek the entrance for ‘access’. Finally, I reached the main gate of the property: the same gate shot by Harlan in 1975 and that can be seen during the first minutes of the film. In 2015, with its surrounding walls kept intact and closed gate, one can no longer enter the property of Torre Bela.

46 In the last forty years Portugal saw a democratic system being fully implemented with the first constituent assembly election, after the fall of the dictatorship, in November 1975; had joined the European Union (1986); and had been bailed out by the IMF three times (1977, 1983, 2011) (Azevedo, 2011).

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Fig. 11 and 12—Juxtaposition of the aerial view showing the main gate in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977) (on the left), and my visit to Torre Bela in 2015 (on the right).

If Harlan’s take is almost omniscient, infused with a flair of exteriority, mine is imbued with a sense of being embedded and in touch with the ‘wall’ (as a surface and a screen of my own visions of Torre Bela) and a confusing set of personal memories: the images of the revolution on television, history books, stories told by my parents and friends. The addition of this register is a way of aggregating historical layers that displace, or at least problematise, the notion of omniscient access that is part of the affective configuration of Harlan’s take. As I previously argued, the temporal relationship of the revolution and its after-effects in the post- revolutionary present is crucial to map a terrain of as-not-yet-lived actualisations and encounters.

‘In touch’ with Torre Bela, I wonder about Harlan’s access.

This gate symbolically launches the entrance, and depicts a notion of ‘access’ to an event that is to be recorded, documented and, ultimately, forged by the cinematic apparatus. ‘Access’ permeates permission to approach the ‘object of research’, but it also launches an appropriation of the logics under which the object is seen. The seemingly neutral positionality implied in the aerial view poses questions about the ‘politics of exhibiting’ and the regimes of the visual deployed by the making of the film. As noted by Bennett (1995), the activity of showing or exhibiting is not neutral, but rather an expression of a power structure—in Foucauldian terms, it is a ‘power/knowledge’ that governs what can be known (Foucault, 1995). It is impossible to dissociate the supposedly neutral world of collecting and showing— or shooting and projecting—and the world of politics and power.

In The Birth of the Museum (1995), Bennett extensively writes about how the ‘politics of exhibiting’ are closely articulated around visibility (showing to the eyes of the audience and making the audience see itself). Making the object of research visible/exhibited happens under the conditions of those who own the means of knowledge production (in the case of the museums); or in the case of Torre Bela,

127 the occupation becomes visible under the conditions of those who own the means of documentation. Under the hegemony of the scopic regime, subjugated knowledges are disguised, unheard in a functionalist coherence or formal systematisation (Foucault, 1995, p. 81). Regimes of visuality, as part of the systemic structure, are closely connected to the production of the event and its memory. As stated by Costa:

The memory of the events at Torre Bela is inextricably intertwined with the memory of the 25 April 1974 Revolution and the most intense years of the ongoing revolutionary process. (Costa, 2012, p. 15)

On the one hand, many participants cited the film to justify a reasoning or to refresh their memory, even if they had been “there” In that time and space depicted in a given sequence “that was what it was like in that scene; it was just like you can see there”, were typical examples of the comments we habitually heard. On the other hand, there were those who hesitated to acknowledge or denied having participated in the occupation, even if they can be seen in the middle of a crowd in the film. (Costa, 2012, p. 93)

When facing the gate, I do not have access to the inside of the property, nor to the story of Torre Bela. This time around, I do not have ways to surpass the gated entrance. Instead, I am sitting by the gate looking through the metal bars. There is a rusty padlock preventing people from opening the gate, entering and visiting the premises. Eventually preventing those interested in what happened after the eviction of the cooperative members and workers to see its remnants, development and dereliction. There is no trace of the tents that were once installed at the entrance for people to stay overnight during the pickets and negotiations in 1975. The people waving on the ground to Harlan in the helicopter are not here either. It seems like it has been a while since someone actually unlocked this rusty padlock, and opened these metal bars that still bear the Lafões family’s heraldic shield.

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Fig. 13—Squatters waving from the ground to Harlan on the helicopter in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video still.

Facing the gateway, I do not intend to jump over or break in. The juxtaposition of my experience and the aerial view interrogates the mechanisms of neutral access to the object of viewing in Torre Bela. Additionally, the juxtaposition explores a modality of knowing the occupation, not based on access to the event, but on non- access. According to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, access determines a certain a priori idea of the identification and the appropriation of the thing to know—which means that it needs to exist as notion or object for the researcher undertaking the investigation. Thus, access implies the constitution of the ‘other thing’ as a topic or subject that is already determined as an identity and consolidated idea (Nancy, 1997, p. 59).

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As Nancy asks in his essay about ‘touching’, ‘Why could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being-between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without “access”?’ (Nancy, 1997, p. 59) Without access to the event, I sit there, in front of the locked gates, and ask myself how being there, even if outside of the physical limits of the estate, allows me to be ‘in touch’—as a contingent and oblique way of making sense—with the revolutionary process that took place forty years ago; as much as with its contemporary affects. To be in touch with the physical walls of Torre Bela is exposing myself to the limits of what can be known in terms of visual and physical access, and touching other ways of knowing or sensing the non-visible affects of the revolution in the past and in the present.

In contact and remoteness, I am confronted with the inaccessibility and the need for alternative engagements which do not make use of the visual regime or ‘seeing’ as a means to know the revolution. Sitting in front of the gate expands the possibilities of knowing and sensing the revolution through a series of non-visual and non-totalising oblique entry points. ‘In touch’ opens the possibilities of knowing as atmospheric set of relations capable of questioning the limitations of the scopic regimes and the privilege of vision as the organ of truth in the European occularcentrist tradition. In this way, ‘touching’ is presented here as a hint to a multidirectional approach and exposes another way to read the ‘underflowing’ affects of the revolution.

III

The camera, as an apparatus of visuality and recording, adds a new element to the scopic constellation in the scene of the film, and in turn complicates the awareness of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ for those acting on the ground—the squatters. To the cinematic space created by the camera I call the space of the gaze. The act of realising one being the object of viewing sets off a relationship between those seeing and being seen, which in this case contemplates squatters and film-crew. To be the object of viewing also makes one aware of one’s positionality in a series of relations, gestures and performativities.

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As previously discussed in this chapter, De Certeau (1994) points out the seeming autonomy of the holder of the bird’s-eye view—embodied by Harlan and the camera in Torre Bela—and how it instigates a series of gazes and performativities on those being seen. ‘Being seen’ comprises constraints and possibilities in one’s performativity. In order to understand the complexities of the space of the gaze at play in Torre Bela, I want to leave the production of the image (the filming and the montage) and address the scene/stage of the event created by the presence of the film crew and the camera.

On the ground, during the unfolding of the event, the ‘cinematic apparatus’—this term is meant to address camera and film crew—makes space for a social and aesthetic relationship set by the realisation of being observed. The in-front-of-thecamera is turned into a conjunction of gazes and displays similar to an exhibition situation consisting of objects on display, audience, and exhibitionary apparatus. Drawing from Tony Bennett’s ‘exhibitionary complex’, I want to investigate the space of the gaze in Torre Bela in its exhibitionary capacities (1994).

The exhibitionary complex stands for the set of disciplines, apparatuses, and spaces of exhibition that together comprise the display to which objects and peoples are subjected. I will argue that the space of the gaze forges senses of surveillance and self-regulation in the performance of the event. However, the scopic space is not able to recognise secret desires, as the one entertained by Wilson.

Torre Bela and its ‘Exhibitionary Complex’

Australian art theorist Tony Bennett (1995) constructs an important genealogy of the modern public museum, laid out through an account of the museum’s formation and its early developments. Bennett explains how questions of museum policies and politics have been posed since the birth of the museum in the nineteenth century through to present times. In this context, he proposes the ‘exhibitionary complex’ as a means to analyse museums beyond mere facts of

131 exhibition making and the management of its institutions. According to Bennett, consideration and articulation of the exhibitionary complex helps to identify disciplinary power structures, their visual strategies, power/knowledge and apparatuses of surveillance in museums (Bennett, 1995, p. 9).

Bennett divides ‘institutions of exhibitions’ into three formats—the public museum, the fair and the international exhibition—and identifies how each has contributed, in different ways, to the development of the public practice of ‘showing and telling’. For Bennett, ‘showing and telling’ refers to how institutions show selected artefacts or persons and provide (arguably, scientifically validated) discourses and interpretations about these same displays. According to Bennett:

Each of these institutions is involved in the practice of ‘showing and telling’: that is, of exhibiting artefacts and/or persons in a manner calculated to embody and communicate specific cultural meanings and values. They are also institutions that by being open to all-comers, have shown a similar concern to devise ways of regulating the conduct of their visitors, and to do so, ideally, in ways that are both unobtrusive and self-perpetuating. Finally, in the recognitions of the fact that their visitors’ experiences are realised via their physical movement through an exhibitionary space, all three institutions have shared a concern to regulate the performative aspects of their visitors’ conduct. (Bennett, 1995, p. 6)

The public museum, the fair and the international exhibition bear some fundamental differences in their political functions and conceptions of time and space. Bennett stresses that despite these differences, the ‘institutions of exhibition’ share cultural and political visions, including providing equal practical and theoretical rights of access to all social groups, and conveying the formation of new ideas of citizenry (Bennett, 1991). Being open to all social groups, such institutions inform via disciplines of knowledge, discourses, and their exhibitionary complexes, the foundations of a new liberal citizen free from subjection to forms of governance. The new citizen is ‘freely’ indoctrinated by scientific disciplines while feeling like their new guardian and perpetuator.

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Bennett’s analysis positions institutions of exhibition in a way that differs from Michel Foucault’s institutions of confinement (1977). Contrary to the institutions of confinement (embodied in the carceral archipelagos that are the prison, the clinic and the asylum), Bennett argues that the museum is an institution of seeming openness and access. Museums appear within the emerging context of the rise of new institutions of showing like arcades and department stores, which are fully open to the general public.

One of the reasons why museum’s displays are made public is because the narrative they represent can be visited—and most importantly, accessed—by as many people as possible. The museum’s space of representation is generated through the exhibition of objects whereby, in turn, history and science are accessed and shown; objects and peoples are made present for viewers. Museums perform the modern idea of democratic access that is legitimated by newfound humanism. As Bennett writes:

The museums served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. (Bennett, 1995, p. 59)

Even though museums are technically enclosed spaces that hold objects within their walls, the accessibility provided to viewers cannot be compared to the privative access of the incarcerated body under the panoptic apparatus of control in prisons or asylums. The incarcerated body is hidden from the public gaze and withdraws from the public dramaturgy of power. Whereas, ‘institutions of exhibition’ transfer objects and bodies from enclosed and private domains in which they had been collected and displayed by and for monarchs, the church and aristocrats—i.e. to a limited number of people—to a public arena of representation and exhibition accessible to all people (Bennett, 1995).

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Accessibility to the museum exhibition does not only refer to the collection displayed. When we say access in this context, we need to contemplate the visual access of visitor to the rest of the audience. People can see (the audience) and be seen (by the audience), at the same time. In the interplay of gazes between the audience members there is another important aspect being forged. This interplay contributes to the constitution of modern society and the new idea of citizenry. The museum opens up access as more than just a mere instrumental way to control power and knowledge relations; the museum exhibition is thought as a space for the new citizen to see and be seen—as an apparatus for the gaze of the audience at the objects on display and, equally important, at the rest of the viewers. Thanks to the visual apparatus, the exhibition space and its mechanisms operate pedagogically, as much as they operate as spaces of social management and administration—and, in turn, promote self-regulation and control.

In spite of the identifiable differences between institutions of confinement and institutions of exhibition, these two models cannot be read as completely dissociated from one another. In fact, as stated above, they both gesture towards the directionality of similar internal movements: as the carceral archipelago gestures towards movements from public to private; the public museum gestures towards movements from private to public. They are constitutive parts of the same governmental programme that seeks to control and self-regulate society based on a scopic regime of seeing and being seen. (Foucault, 1977; Bennett, 1995)

The exhibitionary complex bases its strategies on a sophisticated combination between technologies of surveillance and new forms of spectacle. The ‘spectacle’ is not anymore that of the scaffold present in the society of punishment, where the body of the tortured criminal was exhibited so to make manifest the force of the sovereign (Foucault, 1977). Instead, museums provoke a shift in the deployment of spectacle, by combining it with technologies of surveillance. Order and governance is to be deployed by those who now see and are seen in the grandiose spaces of exhibition and no longer by the visible force of the sovereign. The new citizen is both the target of the new museology, as well as its new guardian. The technologies of control deployed in the museum:

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(…) allow the people to know and hence to regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-regulation. (Bennett, 1995, p. 63 [my emphasis])

Bennett and Foucault’s propositions on new strategies of control and governance—used in the institutions of ‘showing and telling’—allow for a more nuanced approach to the exhibitionary space and its complexities. By understanding the role of seeing and being seen within the exhibitionary apparatus, it becomes clearer how the exhibition space constrains social performativity based on the message delivered by those who own the means of production. Torre Bela’s scopic space operates in a similar way—the squatters are both seen acting the occupation and seeing the occupation unfolding in front of their eyes. I argue that the camera inaugurates the realisation of the interplay of gazes, and therefore, allows me to intersect Torre Bela and the space of exhibition. It is by bearing in mind the space of vision in the exhibition space and its dynamics of control that I assess the film Torre Bela in its exhibitionary dimensions. As in the exhibition space, the awareness of being watched confines the responsibility and control of ‘the new citizen’s’ body gestures, words and public performance.

Politics in the Space of Exhibition and Representation

In Bennett’s argument, the exhibition space of the nineteenth century reflects the modern society of control, in which the apparatus of vision informs both the representation of modern knowledge through the display of objects, and the representation of new social management and administration. In this way, the gaze fostered by the exhibitionary complex helps to mould the roles of new citizens and the directions of new discourses via displayed objects.

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The technologies and regimes of vision in Torre Bela parallel Bennett’s notion of the exhibitionary complex in the sense that both embody the ‘showing and telling’ of what is on display—either the exhibited objects or the committed squatters. However, I argue that the layers of representation (or performativity) fostered by the apparatus of vision in Torre Bela are rather entangled—analysing them unveils the insurrection of heterarchical (multiple micro hierarchies) modes of performativity hidden from the gaze of the camera (Castro-Gomez, 2007). This section of the chapter treats the hidden gaze of Wilson Filipe in Torre Bela as the ‘glitch’ of the representation of the revolutionary social transformation and its political potential happening under the gaze of the cinematic apparatus.

Looking at the heroic representation of Wilson—one of the squatters and the leader chosen by Harlan—unveils the hidden exposures (i.e. the multiplicity of subjugated relations and readings) and affects taking place during the representation of the event. The introduction to the present discussion of Wilson’s performance aims to destabilise the imposed reading delivered by Harlan’s manipulation of the event, and to open the field of exposures beyond the visual representation of the event in Torre Bela. Instead of reproducing a power structure based on a set of disciplines, spaces and apparatus validating a hegemonic discourse, approaching Torre Bela through a reading of ‘exposures’ tackles the subjugated performativities and the unrepresented gazes of those under the apparatus of the quasi-scripted ‘exhibition’.

In order to tackle the subjugated performativities I want to recall the audio piece where Harlan and his crew give directions for the occupation of the palace. It is by listening to the audio piece that José Filipe Costa (2011b) found with the directions of the film crew before the staging of the occupation that I argue that Torre Bela opens the space of exhibition both to the aural and to, what I will define as, unrepresented gazes. In contrast to Bennett's ‘exhibitionary complex’, the dramatisation of the event in Torre Bela’s exhibition discloses an array of invisible and unrepresented exposures. These exposures are able to actualise the political potential of the occupation beyond the manipulation of Harlan and the revolutionary claim.

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Costa, the author of the essay film Red Line (Linha Vermelha) (2011b), maps the memories of Torre Bela nearly forty years after the occupation. Over the course of his investigation, he interviews film crew members including Francis Pisani and Roberto Perpignani, and former occupiers including Wilson, Eduarda Rosa, José Rabaça, and Camilo Mortágua. He visits Torre Bela and its neighbouring villages, and consults archives where documents related to the Torre Bela occupation are stored and preserved.

In his research, Costa comes across an audio file that captures the moment right before the occupation begins. By the time Costa finds the audio track, the correlating filmed images have disappeared. This scene was not included in any of the final versions of the film; in Torre Bela, the occupation has already started inside the palace with the camera recording the interior of the main living room and incomprehensible conversations taking place outside.

Although the accompanying images were lost, listening to the audio gives a feeling of the situation before the occupation. Most of the time, the voices are indistinct, but on occasion, the voices of specific characters, such as Wilson, can be identified. Here is the transcription:

Female voice 1: Now we will see if we will have a better life after entering this house! Crowd: Let’s go! Down with him! Down with the Duke… who is a thief, a bandit, a fascist! Male voice 1: We are fed up of suffering and of going hungry and he doesn’t cultivate the land. Male voice 2: Are we actors or occupiers? Let’s open it now! Female voice 2: We have to go, we have to go. Male voice 3: If we are actors, we are actors. Wilson: To start with… Don’t think just of yourself, think of other people. In the first place, let’s stop laughing… Wilson [speaks in broken English]: I speak, I speak for you… Go inside, come… “lentement”, speak everything… go inside.

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Wilson: Everyone together at the back! Male voice 4: Come on boys, let’s go in, through the back! Wilson: My friends, we have already been here two months… and nobody knows what is beyond that door. Female voice 2: But we will see what there is. Wilson: I have already been inside the palace a long time ago, but there are many people here who have never set foot inside there, hence they are going to enter inside for the first time. And since they are going to enter it for the first time since we are going to use this palace that has only been used for a luxurious way of life throughout its existence, for the hedonistic orgies that they used to hold here this palace will today be used for a worker’s meeting. Think about the revolution you are doing. Female voice 2: we have also got to have some privileges one day. It is not just a life of work. We have never sat in chair like the chair that is in there. I have already peeped through a hole and seen one. So we are going to console ourselves to our heart’s content. Male voice 5: I am fed up of sleeping on the floor. My back is a mess. Female voice 2: Of course. Wilson: Therefore, we are going to go in! Let’s go in! Crowd: [shouting with enthusiasm] Male voice 6 [film crew member, eventually, Harlan, speaks in English and broken Portuguese]: One more time! Vamos entrar! [English translation: Let’s get in!] Wilson: We are going to go in now! And we are going to go in or not? Crowd: [shouting with enthusiasm] [The crowd slams the door.] There! It’s done! The doors are open! Female voice: Oh what luxury!

(Costa, 2011b, [my emphasis])

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For those who have seen the film, identifying Wilson’s voice is an easy task. If Torre Bela were a fictionalised re-enactment of the seizing hold of an event, Wilson would be its main protagonist or even heroic figure. He is involved in the majority of the scenes. Although he never worked for the Duke of Lafões’ family, Wilson has close relatives who had worked in Torre Bela. Wilson moves to the region just after the revolution and joins the occupation of the estate shortly after it has started (Costa, 2012).

Wilson appears frequently in Torre Bela. He first appears giving a speech on an improvised stage in the square during negotiations with the Duke. He appears a second time as one of the few workers taking part in the meeting organised by Harlan at the military compound in Lisbon with the Movement of Armed Forces (MFA - Movimento das Forças Armadas). In another occasion, he is shown leading the meetings for the formation of the cooperative and its organisation. He appears a fourth time in one of the most striking scenes of Torre Bela: in which Wilson demonstrates his ability to explain the paradigm shift from an oppressive labour structure to the cooperative model. In short, Wilson is a spontaneous omnipresent leader. Even to this day, he is considered the self-proclaimed spokesperson of the Torre Bela occupation and still gives interviews to the press about 25th of April and the PREC in the ‘hot’ summer of 1975.47

According to Costa, when Harlan and his crew first arrive in Torre Bela, Wilson is just an anonymous face among the crowd. As Harlan explains in an interview conducted by Costa, Wilson rapidly stood out from the collective and one of the reasons for this was his deep involvement in the cause. Judging by his performance in Torre Bela, Wilson was deeply engaged both politically and emotionally with the occupation process. For instance, during one of his speeches in the square, when he shares the ‘stage’ with militant musicians Zeca Afonso, Vitorino, José Fanhais and others; he becomes so emotional that he eventually bursts into tears while his comrades hug and comfort him.

47 For an example of how Wilson Filipe continues being the representative of the occupation movement in the present see: Coelho, A. L., 2007. ‘Torre Bela, O que é feito da nossa revolução selvagem?,’ Público, 3 August 2007, Available at cinecartaz.publico.pt/noticias.asp?id=179867 [Accessed 10 January 2010].

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Fig. 14 and 15—The crowd in a public meeting (on the left) where Wilson gets emotional during his speech in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video Stills.

Wilson was also critical in connecting two factions of the occupation—the leftist intellectuals and the former waged workers. In Torre Bela, he can be seen operating as a mediator who effectively brings both groups under the same cause, and as a figure who understands the struggles of the former waged worker group, with which he identifies. He also navigates with great confidence the claims and agenda of the leftist intellectuals. Additionally, over other more experienced political activists that had joined Torre Bela’s cause, Wilson is chosen by Harlan to attend for the meeting in Lisbon with the military. Wilson shines as the most important figure of the occupation.

It is important to stress here how Harlan’s choice of following/portraying Wilson as the leader of the occupation demonstrates the importance of the dramatisation of the struggle of the people for the purpose of the film. When Harlan arrives at Torre Bela, there are people more experienced in grassroots political organisations than Wilson. There were individuals who already possessed knowledge about the pressing demands of the situation. This was the case with the Portuguese political leader and activist Camilo Mortágua48, who was an experienced political leader

48 Camilo Mortágua is an important anti-fascist who fought against the dictatorship in exile, from Brazil, France and Venezuela. In 1966, from Paris, he founds with Palma Inácio and Emídio Guerreiro the League of Revolutionary Unity and Action (LUAR Liga de Unidade e Acção Revolucionária). He is a pioneer in methods of political fight. Among other anti-fascists he hijacked packet ship called Santa Maria in 1961 which aimed to overthrow both dictatorships in Iberia Peninsula, and, later a commercial aircraft flying from Casablanca to Lisbon throwing one hundred thousand flyers with political content over the Portuguese territory. After the revolution he returned to Portugal in order to lead the occupation movement in Torre Bela.

140 who fought the dictatorship both in Portugal and while in exile. Mortágua had been called to join Torre Bela’s people, well before Harlan’s arrival, to contribute to the negotiations with the former owners and to the formation of the cooperative.

In spite of Mortágua’s expertise and experience, Wilson seized his spotlight in the film and in the present history of Torre Bela’s occupation. Harlan’s interest in a spectacularised event gave relevance to Wilson’s performance, since his participation showed an acting charisma and a flair for spectacle. Italian director Roberto Perpignani—who also collaborated with Harlan on Torre Bela—expressed that the fact that the camera closely followed the persona of Wilson instead of Camilo Mortágua was due to Wilson’s dramatic and catalysing personality, which was preferable in comparison with Mortágua’s activist allure. (Costa, 2013, p. 55)

‘At first, the camera’s ‘affection’ focused more intensely on the initial leader of the occupation, Wilson, making others fall silent in favour of what Wilson said. (Mortágua in interview with Costa, 2012, p. 55)

Taking the intentional dramatisation of the event into account, we can now begin to unravel the consequences that spectacle and representation have on the political emancipation in the film Torre Bela. With the aesthetics of the film (i.e. how it looks) and the aesthetics of the revolution (i.e. how it takes place and its discourse) being no longer separable, the stage of the event operates as a platform for effective political transformation. If we turn to the enigmatic audio, we can see more clearly how the urge for dramatisation in the making of the revolution is fundamental for Harlan.

Male voice 6 [film crew member, eventually, Harlan, speaks in English and broken Portuguese]: One more time! Vamos entrar! [English translation: Let’s get in!] (Costa, 2011b)

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My proposition is that Harlan’s orchestration in the audio piece gives insights to the ‘theatre of the people’ or the staging of the political space. The theatricality of politics is extensively discussed by Jacques Rancière in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1999). In this book Rancière devises the theatricality of the space of the political as interplay of representations in which the people act and observe their own actions. As noted by Karl Marx and previously cited in Chapter One, the working class—or, in this case, the activist squatters—are both the actors and the audience of their own drama (2010). In this sense, Torre Bela complies with what Rancière defines as the performative space of politics: ‘a staging of reasons and ways of speaking’ (1999). Nevertheless, as Rancière further explains in his text, politics is not the authentic and genuine exercise of power, but is rather a matter of:

(…) performing or playing, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not… Politics consists in playing or acting out this relationship, which means first setting it up as theatre, inventing the argument, in the double logical and dramatic sense of the term, connecting the unconnected. (Rancière, 1999, p. 88)

The playing or acting out is particularly relevant for the understanding of the political space occupied by Wilson’s performance. For Rancière, the visible space of the stage positioned as a performative platform, evidences its close relationship to the spectacularisation of public and political transformation. In demonstrations, the stage of the political happens not in compliance with institutions that perform rule and governance, but rather in the contingent dramatisation of the space of the political. Contrary to the ‘theatre of power’ performed by representative institutions, legal procedures or militant organizations, Rancière’s theatrocracy makes claims for an untutored expression of the people—in line with the emancipated spectator or the ignorant schoolmaster which he devises elsewhere (Rancière, 1991 and 2011).

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According to Rancière, the space of visibility and representation of political subjects is not one of authenticity and honesty (which is what politicians tend to claim for themselves), but rather of the theatrical and artificial. It encompasses the representation of one’s political identity and the disruption of that identity; so that one is recognised as a political subject, but at the same time one escapes the top- down hierarchy of social identities. Since identity is determined top-down, for Rancière, the space of the political is where those representations are disrupted. So the theatricality of the political is both ‘scripted’ and circumvented.

Politics, at the site of the redistribution of the sensible, take place when the space of authenticity becomes disrupted and therefore disturbs the prevailing identities and notions of equity—which are also determined in the top of the hierarchical structure of society. Authenticity, according to Rancière, belongs to the institutions of power and their exercise. In this way, new experimental forms able to break up the readymade functions of class division and political roles need to be fictionalised as an unauthorised and spontaneous improvisation of one’s own disagreement.

I argue that in Torre Bela, the secret desire held by Wilson and his performance brings a certain disturbance to the representation of the revolutionary upheaval. More specifically, his performance undermines what we have seen has being the single manipulation of Harlan and the all-encompassing view of the camera. Wilson’s performance exceeds the representation of his own role as activist squatter and unveils other motivations beyond the aesthetics of the emancipatory event. He does so by fuelling the dramatisation of his performance with his secret desire to become an actor and be brought by Harlan to ‘Europe’.49 The secret desire, in this case, is the subjectivity that escapes from the regulated social identification of him as the spontaneous committed activist.

49 I write Europe in single inverted commas to signpost the paradox present in Wilson’s words. Although Portugal is in Europe, the isolacionism during fascism made it feel like Portugal was not part of Europe. Therefore, Wilson’s desire of ‘becoming an actor in Europe’ is a symptom of the isolacionism under fascism and its actual geographical location.

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In an interview with Costa in the documentary Red Line (Linha Vermelha), forty years after the occupation of Torre Bela, Wilson confesses that his active involvement in the filming of Torre Bela was driven by his secret desire to become an actor (Costa, 2011b). It was Wilson’s intention to emphasise the theatricality of his performance and push the boundaries of its dramaturgy. Wilson thought that if he delivered a good performance acting his own drama, Harlan and his crew would take him to Europe and turn him into a famous actor. As Wilson explains in Red Line (Linha Vermelha):

One day, when he [Thomas Harlan] had finished presenting the film on Torre Bela he told me that he could have taken me with him to many places to make films. I wouldn’t have minded because I liked that life. I like doing things, I like acting50. I would even have liked to be an actor, why not? But, it didn’t work out. And I ended up being the actor of my own life. (Costa, 2011b, 14’’ [my emphasis])

Wilson’s revelation undermines ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ as the only exposures circumscribing the intersection between exhibition and control, and the spectacularisation of acting imposed by the means of recording and display. In order to further investigate the ‘double argument’ (the one of reiterating identity and escaping it) unfolding in Wilson’s performance, I want to go back to the intersection between the space of exhibition in both Bennett’s exhibitionary complex and Torre Bela. For the sake of clarification it is important to say that with ‘double argument’ I am referring to what Rancière defines as the ‘double logical and dramatic’ senses of setting up an argument in the stage of the political. In other words, double argument encompasses the recognisability of Wilson’s performance as a squatter of the occupation and the hidden secret that escapes the identification of his political agency.

As the writer and artist Brigitta Kuster (2007) rightly highlights, Bennett’s analysis of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ is focused largely on the self-relation of the

50 In Portuguese the word ‘acting’ is representar, or in English ‘to represent’.

144 exhibition’s audience between itself and the show, and not on the ‘relationship’ between the looking crowd and the viewed objects and peoples on display. By drawing on the International and Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931, Kuster exposes how indigenous people were put on display and normatively represented as living examples of the earliest stage in human development and the point of transition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (Kuster, 2007, n.p.). Once brought to the European metropolis, the colonised subjects did not have access to anything but the exhibition venue in which they performed and/or were put on display every day for the duration of the show.

Although the Australian historian investigates colonial exhibitions, Bennett’s analysis does not consider another important gaze in the space of the exhibitionary: that of the indigenous gaze. Bennett’s absence of a discussion on the indigenous gaze wrongly implies that the audience of the show supposedly thought that the individuals they were watching did not know they were being observed. Indigenous people were meant to look and act as though they were not aware of the exhibition and its respective viewers. In the voyeuristic fantasy of the audience, the indigenous cast no return glance. For Kuster, the performance of the colonised subjects:

(…) seem to suggest to me the interpretation that the depicted ‘indigènes’ on display are not dancing or selling something or fabricating crafts as much as producing a representation of work and activities within the colonial display that positions them. (Kuster, 2007, n.p.)

Kuster remarks that indigenous subjects’ gestures and acting conveyed more what they were ‘asked’ to perform than their real activities. Instead, the peoples brought from the colonised territories perform what is seen by the oppressor as the non- civilised activities of the everyday. In this way, the individuals on display subjugate themselves self-reflexively under the apparatus of exhibition, working within the ‘spectacular display’ and their positioning as attractions. (Kuster, 2007, n.p.) The exhibitionary complex devised by Bennett does not allow us to observe the

145 symbolic reciprocity of the gaze of those being watched. Although there is nothing preventing those given-to-be-seen from looking back, their spectatorship—e.g. the exhibition’s audience or Harlan and the rest of the Torre Bela film crew—does not recognise the return of the gaze. (Erza, 2000, p. 32)

In this way, the gaze of those on display is neither represented nor representable within the scope of an ‘already scripted’ event such as the acting of the revolution. For instance, in the case of the colonial exhibitions, there are records that evidence resistance and protests against the exploitation of the colonised subjects. When it became known that there was a plan to have Indochinese (colonial term to designate the inhabitants of the regions between India and China) workers pull visitors through the grounds in rickshaws, there were protests organised by the ‘Comity of the Struggle of Indochinese Against the Colonial Exhibition and the Massacres in Indochina’ (Comité de Lutte des Indochinois contre l’Exposition Coloniale et les Massacres en Indochine).51 (Kuster, 2007)

However, the expressed concerns were never incorporated into the official narrative or provided within the space of the exhibition. To look at the articulation of these subjectifications—as ‘return of the gaze’—we need to leave and complicate the framework of the assumptions and representation of the oppressors’ gaze and its relation to the performance of those acting under this gaze.

The Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon writes in his book A Dying Colonialism (1965) about the Algerian war against colonial France in the 1950s and 1960s and its strategies of resistance. After completing his studies in France, Fanon travelled to Algeria to work as a psychiatrist, and he treated people who were suffering from the war traumas. These studies gave Fanon key insights into the power structures and structural violences present in the Algerian colonial occupation. In his book, Fanon delivers his thoughts in

51 La Verite Sur le Colonie (The Truth about the Colonies, 1931) was the first Surrealists’ Exhibition of protest against French imperialism and the Exhibition in Paris. It was organised with the support of the Communist Party. (Blake, 2016)

146 response to his findings and political involvement in the Algerian and Pan- Africanist struggle, which he embraced as an activist.

In ‘Algeria Unveiled’ (1965) Fanon examines the negation of simultaneity in the colonial gaze (i.e. negating that the other has an equal position in the interchange). Among the various elements that are rendered a-modern in the colonial world is the role of Algerian women in society. According to the occupiers’ view, Algerian women are slave to men, inaccessible, ambivalent and subsumed under a masochistic spell. Fanon argues that although several studies reproduce these conclusions based on direct observation and field research (led by European researchers), they critically and problematically do not take into account and/or omit the fact that the people they are studying were occupied people who were militarily subjected to implacable domination—another example of the non- recognisability of the return of the gaze by the oppressors.

From this point on, the real values of the occupied quickly tend to acquire a clandestine form of existence. In the presence of the occupier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. To the scandal of military occupation, he opposes a scandal of contact. Every contact between the occupied and the occupier is a falsehood. (Fanon, 1965, p. 65 [my emphasis])

In this ‘contact of falsehood’, Algerian women undertook numerous strategies of survival and resistance. They learnt how to live and resist the gaze of the colonial power under which they were considered to be submissive and apolitical, and therefore never involved with issues that were directly related to the occupation, the war or political affairs. Fanon convincingly shows how women not only disproved the assumptions rendered by colonial gaze, but he also exposed how the oppressors’ gaze projected an ignorant image under which women invented ways of resistance. Women minutely built defence mechanisms that played a fundamental role in the experience of revolution. For example, they transported guns under their clothes in the streets of Algiers, since the French military would

147 not check them because of believing that they would not be involved in the warfare.

Women are actively taking part in the resistance by tricking the identification of the gaze projected by the oppressors—i.e., of women not having political agency. History tends to highlight single figures or patriarchal groups in the formation of revolutions, but social and political struggles are fought across genres and social classes. Resistance and struggle also take place in the underflows of revolutions, in private spaces and in daily routines. Fanon’s examples from the Algerian War of Independence help to assess unrepresented gazes in the field of exposures. Unrecognised as politically engaged by the gaze of the French oppressors, women actively tricked that gaze by using to their advantage in the Algerian cause their perceived neutrality. Perceived as apolitical by the oppressors’ gaze, Algerian women fought a war in the underflows of the visible struggle.

The return of the gaze presented by Fanon analogously extends to the complexity of Wilson’s performance in Torre Bela. Despite the extreme differences on power structure between both examples (War for Independence in Algeria and Portuguese Revolution), it is under Harlan’s gaze that Wilson commits to representing his assigned/assumed revolutionary role. Furthermore, and more importantly for my argument, in using this space of representation and over- emphasising its dramaturgy Wilson escapes a simplistic identification and plays out his own ambition of becoming an actor. I want to argue that is under a paradoxical gesture that Wilson over-plays his commitment to the cause with the hope that doing so will allow him to leave Portugal and evacuate the political cause altogether.

I do not wish to portray the gaze as a quasi-mystical entity, nor as a spell cast on the behaviour of those who are partaking in the field of the political. In fact, what seems to be operating in Fanon’s example is the deeply performative element of the seemingly subsumed and oppressed gaze of the women in Algeria. Wilson’s case is less dangerous, but no less dramatic; his response to the expectations of Harlan’s direction is so overacted that it intervenes in the ways in which the

148 occupation takes place and is portrayed to the future. In these two examples, the logic of causality that requires the oppressor or the director to be in complete charge of the situation, is broken.

Wilson’s secret desire enacts a double argument in both senses: script and statement. The double argument performs, on the one hand, representation/acting and, on the other, the disruption of the settled definition of his social and political gesture through fiction. The revelation of Wilson’s motivations unsettles the documentary’s rhetoric for realism. His performance complicates the uni-directionality of Harlan’s manipulation, and presents another layer to the interplay of reflections in the field of exposures set up in the exhibitionary space of the film—the return of the gaze from the displayed peoples. Therefore, it is not only Harlan overexposing Torre Bela’s event to its means of exhibition and ‘already written’ discourse. What takes place in Torre Bela is rather a multidirectional relation between exposures that expands beyond the scopic regime and encompasses unrepresented affects and effects of (and beyond) the revolutionary drive.

Wilson’s gaze gestures towards signifying elements that are present in the production of the event, but unrepresented in the film’s discourse. In order to sense the articulation of unrepresented subjectivizations—such as Wilson’s hidden secret desire—the exhibition space of the film needs to be considered as a multidirectional field of exposures. In the fantasy image of Wilson a radical imagination escapes representation both through the imagining of things that do not yet exist, and through the eliciting empathy to imagine and understand things as they are.

In order to conclude, the secret desire of Wilson performs the disruption of Harlan’s gaze that views the occupation of Torre Bela as a construct and forging force of the social identification of those acting in the revolution. As stated by Rancière, the spectacle and artificiality of the political stage—countering the ‘realism’ of the oppressive power—displaces the distribution of social functions of politics. This disruption refers to the placeless or the out-of-place; it does not refer

149 to class, but to the unclassified and the out-of-class. For the same reason, the egalitarian democracy that Rancière defends lies on imagining other forms of social organisation. Wilson’s imagination can be read as the ‘ungovernable element upon which every government, in the end, is founded’. (Rancière, 2005, pp. 57; 105–6)

The essence of equality is not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with controversial figures of division. Equality is the power of inconsistent, disintegrative and ever replayed division. (Rancière, 1995, pp. 32 and 33)

The double argument of Wilson consubstantiates the replayed division between the representation of the occupation and its actual taking place. It repositions the stage of the revolution the privileged site of displacement (the place for the out-of- place) of what is not-yet-known and the ruins of its manipulation.

Conclusion

Why, then, is “access” determined here a priori as the identification and appropriation of the “other thing”? When I touch another thing, another skin or hide, and when it is a question of this contact or touch and not of an instrumental use, is it a matter of identification and appropriation? At least, is it a matter of this first of all and only? Or again: why does one have to determine “access to” a priori as the only way of making-up-a-world and of being-toward- the-world? Why could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being- between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without “access”?” (Nancy, 1997, p. 59)

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This Chapter analyses the space of exhibition in Torre Bela based on the principle of ‘seeing and being seen’ and on the domination of the scopic regime in ‘showing and telling’. Through my analysis of the aerial view of the property in the Torre Bela’s opening scene, I argue that the scopic apparatus in the documentation of the Portuguese event in Ribatejo region poses limitations to the reading of the aesthetic manifestations of the event beyond its visual and physical access. The juxtaposition of ‘my visit to Torre Bela in 2015’ and the secret desire of Wilson to become an actor in Europe, proposes a shift away from hegemonic readings of the exhibitionary and the performativities they encompass. In Bennett’s reading, the dominant logics are mainly visual, discursive and determined by privileged power structures of knowledge production. However, Wilson’s double argument undermines this directionality and opens the exhibitionary to the unfolding of performative gestures invisible to the scopic apparatus and the dominating narratives.

The situation of being without physical or visual access to the property where the occupation took place is a way to speculate about other forms of exposure to the events in 1975—forty years before my visit. In undermining access (conceptual and literally) as a way of knowing what happened (or its meanings in the post- revolutionary present), I aim to enact an expansion of the sense of ‘making sense’. Rather than searching for a sense that clarifies and explains ‘what is’, I argue for sense in the edges of meaning, like me sitting on the edges of the property or Wilson over-performing his role as an attempt to escape the seeming authenticity of his acting. This is as if ‘meaning’ were nothing else but this edge, this fringe, and this margin that exceeds and undercuts the structures of the symbolic order. The limit of sensing is not of the possibilities of knowing, but of the touch or encounter (membrane to membrane) in contact or remoteness between different registers. The juxtaposition of these registers aims to provoke new readings about the past/present of the effects and affects of the post-revolutionary present.

As stated by Nancy, ‘sensing’ cannot be seen—even if it is before someone’s eyes— but it can be sensed (Nancy, 1998), by shifting registers.

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That one speaks of sense does not mean that one abandons or disdains the category of truth. But one does shift registers. Truth is being-such [l’ëtre-tel], or more exactly it is the quality of the presentation of being such as such. Since, for its part, is the movement of being-toward [l’ëtre-à], or being as coming into presence or again as transitivity, as passage to presence—and therewith as passage of presence. Coming does not arise out of presentation any more, indeed, than it arises of nonpresentation. (Nancy, 1998, p. 12)

The image-essay of the gate in Torre Bela’s estate (me being towards, ‘in touch’ with the opacity of the walls), and the Costa’s found audio file enact a register shift in the present investigation. In the sense of Nancy’s epigraph, this thesis instantiates gestures that open up meaning of the revolution via contact with the senses of ‘being-among, being-between, and being-against’ the opaque affects of its narratives—the unknowns of the lost images, the cloudiness of Wilson’s (re)presentation, the inaccessibility to the farm. These registers of ‘being-against’ (‘in touch’) open up and make porous new senses around the revolution that refuses to engage only with the declamatory and emancipatory discourse of the occupation. In this way, these registers engage with its unclear failures and non- revolutionary gestures.

However, exploring ‘sensing’ as modality of meaning-making, I do not intend to disdain the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the effective transformations that occurred in the country. Rather, ‘sensing’ sheds light on aural and aptical registers able to question naturalised (i.e., acritically internalised) narratives and mechanisms of discourse formation.

In Chapter Three, I will continue my investigation of the aesthetics of the revolution and, more precisely, of the surplus of oppressions of the post- revolutionary process. The third chapter will focus on the grammar of change deployed to read revolutionary breaks in historical narratives and the violences implied in these processes. However, in probing the ‘violences’ of the revolution, I do not seek to map the physical opposition between opponents (i.e. oppressed and

152 rulers) or the so-called symbolic violence of the new beginning. My investigation in the following chapter aims to tackle the ‘silenced violences’ present in the contemporary affects of the Portuguese Revolution. The untold story of Grada Kilomba and the hidden presence of Ventura bring to the definition of revolution: phantasmatic memories, missing histories and forgotten presences. The juxtaposition of these registers, which are not part of the official stories of the revolution, reveals that the revolution and post-revolutionary processes failed and continue to fail in overthrowing naturalised symptoms of colonialism and racism.

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VISUAL ESSAY TWO

The Aerial View

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The Aerial View in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video Stills: 8’’-2’24’’

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III52

When this revolution happened I was thirteen, almost. I don’t think anyone have lived something like that. It was, for me, a real revolution in its etymological dimension. The energy of the moment of change is very brief. The violence of presence was there. It was a film. The present was unfolding all the time. No past, no past, just present. So I was in that euphoria and then [decades later] I understood that Ventura was not. Not only him, but also his brothers and sisters. But I was in that euphoria for more than a year. All of us were. The nightmare was beginning. These soldiers, these people, these agents that imagined and designed the revolution were very young. They were very young. They were twenty years old maximum. The revolution was set to end up wars in Africa. That is what they wanted to do, mainly. Because during the dictatorship they had to go to the war. A lot of young Portuguese boys were dying every day. So the idea was to stop the war in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. To stop it. Change the regime.

For a guy on his thirteen, learning about politics, getting into cinema, film, poetry (everything at the same time) could not help but make this film one day [Horse Money]. In short, Horse Money confronts the soldier, the young captain, with his failure. Ventura is his failure. Again if we had won [the revolution], there would be no film. Not this one, for sure. And Ventura won’t be as he is. By talking to Ventura and the people in the neighbourhood I understood that the situation was way more complex. These soldiers (brave, young, illiterate men), that were first going to die in the war, suddenly were not going overseas and became the revolutionary army. And what the soldiers did was to pass by the slums and ‘play some games’ [with the black migrants]. That is what they did. Some revolution games, let’s say.

There were some contradictions in this process that eventually lead to its failure. And there are some things that were never really confronted. That is why Ventura was saying and telling me these stories of being really angry with these young

52 Passage of transcribed interview and Q&A with Pedro Costa conducted by Laura Mulvey for the première of Horse Money in London, ICA, 18th September, 2015.

163 soldiers and I could barely believe. My reaction, first time I have heard him telling these stories, was to go the newspapers archive and search for the newspapers of the 1st of May 1974 [first free demonstration one week after the fall of the dictatorship]— it was close to my home, I was there. In none of those pictures there is a black face. Since I was born in Lisbon I remember back people. It is a black city, too. It is a very very mixed city. And in the pictures all you can see is a mass of white static faces and feasts. Ventura was right. He is telling the truth. Black people were all hidden. 400.000 guys hidden in parks, houses and caves. That is something you have to confront, analyse and think. Maybe the revolution was a failure also because of this. Because we were not gentle. I don’t know. Because they didn’t put the two sides together.

(…)

Over the course of the last twenty years. I cannot say I have seen them [Cape- Verdean community] happier. But I am seeing them going mad, going insane. More and more broken memories. And it is contagious for someone who likes them so much, as I do. In work you become the other. You have to become a little bit the other. It is not you have to, or you need do. You want to.

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CHAPTER THREE

Actualising Revolution—The Non-Revolted Affects and ‘Continuities’ of The Portuguese Revolution

For liberation in the revolutionary sense came to mean that those who not only at present but throughout history, not only as individuals but as members of the vast majority of mankind, the low and the poor, all those who had always lived in darkness and subjection to whatever powers there were, should rise and become the supreme sovereigns of the land. If for clarity's sake we think of such an event in terms of ancient conditions, it is as though not the people of Rome or Athens, the populus or the demos, the lower orders of the citizenry, but the slaves and resident aliens, who formed the majority of the population without ever belonging to the people, had risen and demanded an equality of rights. This, as we know, never happened. (Arendt, 1990, p. 40 [my emphasis])

Introduction

Chapter Three juxtaposes my own deferred and remote memories of the Portuguese Revolution, alongside narratives conveyed by the media and history books in the present. In an attempt to actualise the symbolic order of revolution I take from Hanna Arendt’s political genealogy the definition of ‘revolution’ (1990), followed by an analysis of the etymology of the term, as examined by Martin Jay (2003). Revolution comes up as a manifestation that is historical and semantically grounded on what I will define as a ‘grammar of change’.

Arendt’s definition points to types of violence implied in the taking place of profound transformations of the social and political fabric. Drawing on the typologies of violence expressed in Arendt’s text, this chapter argues for oppressed subjects and histories that failed to revolt during the seeming totalising process of liberation and emancipation. I use the term ‘continuities’ to describe non-revolted

165 and repeating affects of the post-revolutionary present. In order to tackle their aesthetic manifestations and sediments this chapter investigates Filipa César’s essay-film Conakry (2013) and Pedro Costa’s long feature film Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014).

I will argue that the stories told and dreamed by Grada Kilomba (Conakry) and Ventura (Horse Money) cannot be recognised by the ‘grammar of change’, given that these stories speak to the oppressed silences of post-revolutionary Portugal. The two stories (testimonies) disclose ‘revolution’ as a limited reading strategy of change and emancipation and ‘revolutions’’ incapability of recognising what is kept away from emancipation. Arguing for the non-revolted affects and effects of the revolution in the present interrogates the existing grammar and allows us to open it up to the silenced sediments sitting on the foundations of the new beginning and novelty. When I refer to the sediments of the foundation of the grammar of change I mean the barely signifying gestures that are kept away from appearance.

Both Grada Kilomba in Conakry and Ventura in Horse Money contribute to undermine a certain notion of revolution, understood as a radical transformation; they open the grammar of revolution to the more disquieting political aesthetics of silencing and forgetting. The speculative figure of ‘continuities’ breaks the linearity of the grammar of change and proposes new strategies to read what is kept from emancipation. These strategies are: repetition and insistence on the ‘same’, as a way to evade the lure of the novelty and the rush to move on to the next paradigmatic shift. Moreover, ‘insisting’ as a reading strategy allows for a non- linear navigation through seemingly non-related effects and non-chronological juxtapositions.

Introduction [to my revolution]

Revolutions are defined as sudden reverses that follow years of continuity. Under the conditions of this disruption, the oppressed are freed from the hooks of the

166 despotic regime. Disruptions create space for the subjects to build a more just society where those who were formerly oppressed occupy the space of the rulers. On the 25 April 1974 in Portugal a socialist dream orients the convoluted break with the past and leads the first two years of ‘freedom’. A society is finally liberated from the grips of old political structures, repressive modes of governance and its colonial heritage. The country can finally express its dreams, visions, and futures in control of its history and its present. A new set of possibilities is now under transformation; tomorrow will be another day. Tomorrow ‘the new’ will stabilise and consolidate the foundations of a greater historical moment for the country and its peoples.

The above description generically conveys what I was told in school and at home while growing up in a small town in a central region of Portugal. This is after the revolution. We are in the early eighties. In 1982, my family moves from the Ribatejo region (not too far from Torre Bela estate) to Caldas da Rainha. This happens a few years after my parents collaborate in the land reform, working with literacy programmes and socialist political movements. By moving to Caldas, my parents’ intend to start up a new life, after the long-winded political situation.

As many Portuguese leftist intellectuals did after the revolution, my parents returned from the exile in France, and joined the socialist struggle of the people in the countryside. They helped to implement an education programme for a quasi- illiterate population (Rézola, 2007). Although they both migrated to France more or less at the same time (one of the main destination countries of Portuguese migration during Salazarism), they only meet in Portugal after the collapse of the dictatorship, and after they—and thousands of other young people—were able to return to their country.

During Salazar’s regime (and his successor Marcelo Caetano), my parents were both actively involved in the resistance against the dictatorship. Despite their early age (both in their late teens), in the late sixties and early seventies they eventually managed to leave the country. My father, as a young man pursuing his studies in Law in his first year in the University of Coimbra, was deeply involved in what is

167 now known as the Student Revolt against the regime in 1969—way before the revolution. The protests of 1969 in Coimbra are one of the first visible signs of the increasing political discontent; one could even say: a loud sign of the revolution to come.

As an outcome of my father’s involvement in this protest and in related political activities in Coimbra, he was arrested and persecuted. When he was released, he did not have many options. In troubles with PIDE (International and State Defence Police or Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) the pursuit of his studies was compromised and the danger of being sent to fight in the colonial war was imminent. Between 1961 and 1974 a Portuguese young man that would fail to illegally flee the country would have no choice but forcibly join the bloody colonial wars being fought in three of the Portuguese colonies in Africa: Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. By joining the armed forces, young men—with no experience in military service—fought against the independent movements for liberation of the African countries under colonial oppression.

My father’s story is far from being singular. It can be counted as many times as lives of young men existed during the almost fifteen years of colonial war (1961-74). For these generations there were only two possibilities: joining an unjust war, or fleeing the country.

After his successful escape my father settled in Paris. During his time in exile he wrote extensively to his parents. Some of the letters were confiscated by PIDE before getting to my grandparents’ hands; but those that arrived at the destination were rigorously kept by my grandmother and given back to my father years later. Despite my grandparents’ animosity towards his political involvement in the political struggle, he dedicated a lot of the content of the letters to explain his Marxist-Leninist visions of an imaginary country freed from oppression.53 Here is an excerpt of a letter that my father wrote one year before the revolution:

53 During this period of political isolationism and colonial war, many people left the country. In exile or fighting in the war, one of the most common, and (most of the times) unique way to keep in touch with relatives and friends was written correspondence. For instance, the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes published an epistolary novel D’Este Viver Aqui Neste Papel Descripto (in English, From This Life

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The independence of Guinea-Bissau proves that the path I have consciously chosen is correct. It demonstrates that the path for every people is the liberation from colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Today Guinea-Bissau is an independent country, already recognised by 88 countries and that, shortly, will have its seat in the UN, as a member in its whole. The History will not forgive the marcelist reactionaries [reference to Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s substitute since 1968] who continuously support the exploitation of the colonised people and of the Portuguese people as well.

Tomorrow will be Mozambique’s turn, and of Angola, of Sao Tomé and Príncipe, of Palestine, of South Africa and of Rhodesia; and of Portugal. These people will stand out in arms against the exploiters from the US, France, Germany, Portugal, and so on and so forth.

For these reasons I am happy to refuse a bourgeois life-style of a parasite student and to embrace a sound life, of honesty and of perfect communion with the truthful Portuguese people.

Now, my ambition is only that one day (soon) Portugal will become a free country, a popular-democratic country. That is to say, I will give everything, even my own life, if need be, to see socialism and communism come true in Portugal, and only on that day the great majority of the Portuguese people will be happy.

(…)

But the day of the great revolution is not far… and then we will see who is on the side of the people and who is not… (Rito, 1973, [my translation from the original in Portuguese])54

Described Here In This Paper) (2005) with the letters exchanged with his wife when he was fighting in the colonial war between 1971-73. The Portuguese filmmaker Ivo Ferreira based his film Letters from War (Cartas de Guerra) (2016) on the epistolary novel. Ferreira’s film had its world premiere at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, in February 2016. 54 This passage is a section of a letter written by my father (Luís Nuno e Sousa de Oliveira Rito), to his parents, (Luís Oliveira Rito and Maria Amélia e Sousa de Oliveira Rito) during his exile in Paris from 1969 to 1975.

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Fig. 16 and 17—Fragments of a letter sent by my father to his parents on 24 February 1970.

Being the last child of three daughters, I grew up listening to these numerous stories, told by my parents and their friends. Their friends had been equally involved in the political resistance against fascism in exile, and back to Portugal after the revolution. The stories were mainly about: resistance and struggle in Paris and Grenoble (France); the contagious excitement during the revolution; their

171 return to the country; and their political work during the land reform in the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC Processo Revolucionário em Curso). I am, in fact, a child of all those changes; of all those stories that were told to me over and over; and they contain all the fantasies I imagined of the country where I was being brought up and where I dreamed of living all my life.

Fig. 18—French Fixed-Term Working Permit (‘Carte Ordinaire de Travail a Validité Limitée’) of my father (Luís Nuno e Sousa de Oliveira Rito)

These stories are a great part of my revolution, and a great part of the content of the history books in the section dedicated to the military coup of 1974. And it is the belief in the liberated country and in the transformations undertaken ever since the revolution that drove my interest in Torre Bela (1977). It is the occupation, the formation of the cooperative in Ribatejo; but also the presence of the filmmaker, the participation of Wilson and his desire to leave a new free country55—to be an actor in ‘Europe’. All of these stories are part of the affective drives shared by hundreds. In the same way as Torre Bela, these are stories of emancipatory transformations, which I heard once and again, read in the history books (Mattoso, 1998) and saw in contemporary film (Medeiros, 2005).

55 I write this thesis from London to where I moved since 2010 and have no immediate plans to leave due to the difficulties to find a job in my area of expertise in Portugal.

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The conclusions drawn in the two previous chapters point to non-eventual occurrences and unrepresented desires of the revolution, as they fail to signify under the mechanisms of the event and its representation in Torre Bela’s film. The following argument will take advantage of the epistemic tools used in the previous chapters: ‘non-event’ (as a tool able to encompass the manipulative gestures in the production of the event as novelty); and ‘sensing’ (as an aptical and rhizomatic investigative practice).

Leaving the scene of Torre Bela, but not the problematics provoked by its material, the following section aims to interrogate the conceptual and historical definition of revolution. Drawing on Hanna Arendt’s political genealogy of revolution, the term is analysed against the background of its ‘grammar of change’ that prevents oppressed subjects and histories to revolt in the turmoil of the arguable emancipatory event. Although the story that was told to me was undoubtedly a beautiful one; I wonder how the silenced affects can allow for an actualisation of ‘my’ revolution in the present.

Revolution: freedom, violence and silence

During the course of the last centuries, the theoretical discussion around the term revolution and its political significance has entertained theorists in the field of philosophy, and critical and political theory (Machiavelli, 2003; Sieyès, 1988; Marx, 2007; Arendt, 1990; Zizek, 2014). Although not initially named as revolution, the reflection proposed by Italian philosopher and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, in the sixteenth century, prematurely investigates how to forcibly overthrow the rulers from power and substitute of one form of government for another (Machiavelli, 2003). Nevertheless, it is not before the French Revolution (1789-1799) that the term starts to be used in the context of the human affairs to signify rapid political changes in the forms of institutionalised governments (Arendt, 1990).

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Be it the Haitian, the French, the October, the Cuban, the Carnation, or the Iranian Revolution, all these events are set apart from other more quotidian political and historical phenomena. They are so because of the transformations they bring about; which are seen as unique and exceptional. Whatever circumstances precede the event or whichever their outcomes are, revolutions are not conceivable outside of the domain of rupture and the production of new beginnings. They are seen as processes that seize the old order and replace it with an emancipatory one, by bringing something new (Arendt, 1990).

The meaning of revolution, as we use it today, was initially taken from the jargon of astronomy. Over time it gained different meanings and came to convey an interruption in the course of history. But this interruption accounts for a specific kind and not just an abrupt change. As noted by German-born US political theorist Hanna Arendt, it needs to be an emancipatory transformation that has an impact on ‘mankind’ (1990, p. 11). When revolution is applied to human affairs and political ruptures it involves overthrowing the previous political order and replacing it with one that gives voice to the oppressed, liberating them from tyranny and despotism. Emancipatory transformation, therefore, implies a deep involvement of the people—subjects of the tyranny during the old regime—in the process of constituting a new government and political order that helps build a more just society.

If revolution claims for transformation, it seems fundamental to understand how calling for ‘revolution’ sets up a grammar of political and social change that underwrites the consequent political order. Regarding this ‘grammar of change’, first it is important to note what I mean by grammar. Grammar is a branch of the science of semiotics, which consists in the systems and structures under which language is deployed and made understandable; meaning, the rules under which words are put together in order to make up a ‘sense’. The reason why I prefer to use the term ‘grammar’ to, for instance, ‘glossary of change’ is because grammar does not consist in the collection of words that compose a language, or even the definition of those terms. Rather, grammar enounces a very different capacity, which is way more invisible.

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Grammar refers to the ‘basis’ or foundations of the use of language (Derrida, 1998). In order for speech and text to make sense, grammar is always already in use. What I mean is that grammar is the invisible foundation through which language is spoken, written and thought. And it is under the conditions of these rules—i.e., syntax and morphology—that one can speak a language, or, what is more, make sense of a thought and idea. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida examines in his books on language and writing (1973, 1998, 2001), grammar cannot be simply changed, because no matter how hard we try, we need to make use of its rules in order to claim (voice, write) its transformation. Grammar is the set of internalised laws and logics that govern the deployment of language.

I argue that, in an analogous fashion, the deployment of the term revolution also calls for a specific ‘grammar’ that underwrites the reading of the historical event. In this case, as we have seen above, the term revolution implies a set of structural transformations such as: liberation of the oppressed, who are in turn motivated by an opposition to dictatorial regimes, colonial occupation, and capitalist exploitation. That is to say that by calling an event ‘revolution’ one evokes the struggles between the desire for freedom and the oppression set up by despotic rulers. Moreover, revolutions, as a term, resonate with changes that are driven by ideological and political principles, and are generally associated with leftist ideology based on the liberation of the oppressed over the exploiters.

Delving into the political genealogy of revolution, Hanna Arendt states that: ‘Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.’ (Arendt, 1990, p. 34) Therefore, revolution is not only about a simple change, it entails the introduction of a freedom that was not there before; for instance: the freedom of speech, and the power of locomotion from unjustified restraint (1990, p. 32). Deprived from such inalienable rights during the dictatorship, the oppressed guarantees the seizing of the political space and their participation in the institutions of government (Arendt, 1990).

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The definition proposed in Hanna Arendt’s thoughts frames revolution under, what I call, a ‘grammar of change’; hence, a symbolic and signifying order which argues for a conceptual and historical transformation based on principles of freedom and of emancipation of the oppressed knowledges and subjects over the ruling class. Although the concepts of liberation, emancipation and freedom are undeniably related to revolutionary transformations, as noted by Arendt, I pause here to entertain a discussion around another revolution’s component: violence.

In the aforementioned text, Arendt (1990) understood too well that these events do not take place without a great level of violence that is exercised all across the spectrum. The political theorist argues that the task of breaking down normativity, and founding a whole new beginning demands violence and violation (1990). There are at least two modes of violence being exerted under the conditions of revolutionary processes. First, it is the violence exerted in the confrontation between the very nature of a despotic regime, which does not want to give away its power, against the liberation forces. The regime struggles to regain the means of governance. The first type of violence comes about, for instance, in physical, armed and verbal confrontations.56

The second type of violence erupts out of contained tensions, pressures and strains built up over time, which finally surface in the moment of liberation. An example of the ubiquitous presence of violence and violation is the almost inevitable participation of the military in designing, orchestrating and delivering the revolution. As a consequence, the military officers are usually the first presidents or prime-ministers of the country after the coup.57 The bellicose force of the country and the solidarity—or, better said, the interest—of the military in the coup d’etat is arguably fundamental for a successful transition in the forms of government and its political ideology. Regarding the role of the military, Arendt

56 It is pertinent for the present discussion to consider the re-enactment of the Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917) directed by Einsenstein in 1927 under the title October—Ten Days that Shook the World, for the visual representation of the violence that is implied in historical events such as revolutions. 57 For instance, in the Portuguese and the Cuban Revolution the first President or Prime-Minister of the country who took power after the event was a military officer, respectively, António de Spínola and Fidel Castro. As seen in previous chapters, the Portuguese revolution counts with two years of a revolutionary process led by the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas—MFA) that initiated the process and stayed in power until the first democratic elections in November 1975.

176 asserts: ‘(…) it is the function of the army to protect and to defend the civilian population’ (Arendt, 1990, p. 15) from the hostile repression of the old regime.

However, violence is not only exercised by the armed forces and the people in killings, torture and arrests. It is not only objective confrontation and verbal aggression between opponents. Equally, it is not only the symbolic violence present in the inscription of a new beginning and the foundation of the new institutions of governance. Drawing on the violence involved in the revolutionary process, I want to shed light on other forms of violence at play that are themselves inscribed beyond the struggle between the two most visible opposed factions, hence: the old and the new order; the liberal and the repressive. To speculate on a violence that sits beyond the emergence of the new beginning and the opposed forces is to consider other ‘struggles’ that escape the main logics and readerships of the ‘grammar of change’.

In order to propose a look at yet another type of violence implicated in the revolutionary processes, I want to return to Arendt’s analysis on revolution. There is a moment in Arendt’s essay where she reflects upon the impossibility to objectively address violence and its effects. Her preoccupation derives from the fact that violence itself is not capable of expression, or, in other words, of ‘speech’.

The point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. Because of this speechlessness political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to the technicians. For political thought can only follow the articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains bound to what appears in the domain of human affairs; and these appearances, in contradistinction to physical matters, need speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be manifest at all. (Arendt, 1990, p. 18 [my emphasis])

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Arendt points to the difficulties faced by political theory in dealing with and reflecting upon violence; since the discipline can only study the effects or ‘what appears in the domain of human affairs’. Instead, violence operates in a rather different manner or in a rather intangible sphere, because it is incapable of speech or of appearing as an intelligible articulation. Although violence cannot be denied as a physical matter—that can be heard, seen and described—its matter operates in a rather invisible sphere. In this way, Arendt defines violence as a physical matter that cannot be denied, but that which lacks speech and cannot be objectively observed. What is seen, heard and described are the aftermaths of violence’s forces and not its actual manifestation.

The incapacity for violence to ‘speak’ or become manifest in its own capacity—that it is not its effects—cannot be read as simple incapability to utter sounds. In fact, if we want to consider the sounds emitted by acts of violence, we can easily list a number of them, ranging from explosions and clashes, to screams of torture and killing. As previously discussed in Chapter One, speech is not only dependent on the human capacity to utter sounds (words), but rather on the capacity of the uttered words to be heard as a comprehensible and intelligible speech and to function as intelligible statements (Rancière, 2009a; Foucault, 2002). In other words, this means that by using the term speech, Arendt is not referring to random sounds and voices emitted through violent acts, but to those sounds that are bounded to audible and intelligible speech.

Arendt’s statement about the speechless violences acknowledges a surplus of non- accountable manifestations which, due to their non-appearance in intelligible discourse and signification, are deprived from political thought. In this way, there are asignifying operations that take place during the violent process of the revolution, which cannot be analysed, nor count for as articulable manifestations. At this point of the argument, we are not anymore talking about violence implied in physical confrontation, or in the symbolic transformation of the new beginning. Instead, what Arendt’s argument points at transcends the binary involving rulers and oppressed. What emerges out of Arendt’s compelling argument is that the speechlessness of violence contains manifestations that are rendered asignificant. I

178 want to further argue that these manifestations are not necessarily silent, but rather silenced.

In order to understand the silenced violences of the revolution I need to recall the ‘grammar of change’. As we have seen above, calling for a revolutionary process is to render the event readable under the ‘grammar of change’. However, there are occurrences that despite taking place at the same time cannot be assessed through the same logics. I argue that there are occurrences taking place that are being silenced due to their non-readability under the same ‘grammar of change’. The grammar of change is therefore capable of rendering some events recognisable, but also of exerting a silencing violence over the non-revolted presences of the revolution.

Revolutions, as well as events, are plural. Not only in meaning but also in their claims and oppressions. The use of the term ‘oppressed’ in the singular does not help to read the complexities of ‘presences’ and ‘oppressions’ in revolutionary processes. The universalised oppressed in Western revolutions refers, generally speaking, to the white male working class. In this way, it is incapable to recognise the multiplicity of oppressed, levelling the subjectivities under the pervasive power of the regime. What is more, singularising ‘oppressed’ brings these multiplicities to bear upon the new order.

In order to read the Portuguese Revolution, the notion of oppressed needs to be questioned. What needs to be assessed is not how it represents the white Portuguese under the despotic regime, hence, the white Portuguese families living in Portugal, or the white administrative bodies of the colonies—who massively returned to Portugal after the revolution and the independence of the colonies. Rather, what needs to be taken into consideration is how the universalised notion of oppressed fails to contemplate five hundred years of colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism. To the non-white oppressed left on the peripheries of the revolution I call the repressed-oppressed.

In an interview with the Portuguese director Pedro Costa for the London premiere of his latest film, Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014), Costa refers to the

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‘intriguing’ absence of black people in the public demonstrations of support to the revolution in the days following April 25 1974 (Costa, 2015). The black communities of the revolution do not occupy, as Arendt would call, the new political space of appearance, for instance, demonstrations, confronts, protests, new discourse, new policies, new demands. In Horse Money, Ventura (a recurrent participant/actor in Costa’s films) recalls the traumatic memories of his revolution. As an African-Portuguese coming from Cape Verde (a Portuguese African colony until 1975), Ventura does not have the best memories of this great revolutionary event. In the film we are confronted with his memories of humiliation and violence, where the military (the same that liberated Portugal from the dictatorship) chased and tortured ‘black migrants’ in the woods and parks of Lisbon in that same period.

I claim that the ‘grammar of change’ (expressed in the formula liberation, emancipation and freedom) does not recognise a multiplicity of subjects and histories in the process of transformation or in the history books. This grammar ‘universalises’ freedom and justice according to the white supremacy and citizenry, discarding and effacing the multiple voices taking part in the process of democratization and decolonization. In order to tackle the unheard voices in the making of the revolution I aim to analyse the silences of this revolution as the ‘continuities’ of the previous order and the sediments of the presupposed new beginning.

The description of what happened in the morning of the 25th of April is quite suggestive of the happiness and euphoria lived during those days in the streets of Portugal. The soldiers—many of whom were young men in preparation to join the colonial war in Africa—drove war tanks and military cars from Santarém to Lisbon in a cold night and took over the streets of the capital to overthrow the dictatorship. I recall the numerous images of the military protecting the people and driving the tanks to the Carmo Square—the epicentre of the military coup. And now, forty years later, it is when recalling the loud sounds of the people in the streets, the happiness of the laughter, the enthusiasm and excitement in the presence of a new era to come that I wonder about the silenced and non-revolted

180 subjects, subsumed by the over-signifying discourse of the revolutionary grammar.58

Fig. 19, 20, 21 and 22—The military and the people in the streets of Lisbon on 25 April 1974. Documentation Centre 25th April (Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril).59

The Absent-Presence at the Dinner Party with John Cage

One could argue that revolutions are processes of indistinct and loud noise. The so-called noise comes from the chants, the orders, the enthusiasm, and the chaos.

58 In Sérgio Trefaut film titled Another Country (Outro País) (2000) a group of foreign photographers, directors and activists are interviewed and tell their story about how they went to Portugal right after the revolution to document and their impressions about the atmosphere lived in the country. For most of the participants in the film, before the revolution Portugal was a quite unknown country—here is important to recall the level of isolation fostered by Salazar during the fifty years of dictatorship. But the revolution raised the attention of international newspapers and magazines. Most of the people interviewed were sent by news agencies they worked for, or out of their own interest and curiosity. Thomas Harlan and Robert Kramer also feature in Another Country (Outro País). During their time in Portugal, one of the biggest remarks was the enthusiasm of the people. It seemed like the population was taking the matter into their own hands and there was a positive and contagious atmosphere in the air. 59 For more images and documents of the 25 April 1974: http://www1.ci.uc.pt/cd25a/wikka.php?wakka=Galeria&pn=48&album=OperacoesMilitares

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The multitude is in the streets shouting and gathering in the public square to demonstrate their support, opposition and opinion—most of the times, after a long period of silence and censorship. The confrontation between the different parties can be involved in great noise as well. Bombs explode, weapons are shot, people run, people hide, and people try to survive. It is a moment of confusion and uncertainty. Nobody really knows what is to come and in which shape.

According to Hanna Arendt, the non-speaking violences are not far from the cacophony heard in the streets. The silences and the noise overlap in a Benjaminian dialectical tension—not oppositional but in a complementary disjunction. What silenced violences lack is meaning to be recognised; meaning to operate in the redistribution of the symbolic order. In order to tackle the silences of repressed discourses extant in the revolution, one needs to analyse the constitution of silence as it comes to unprivileged sound in the hierarchy of sense- making. That is to say, silences are sounds, what makes some unprivileged are the power structures of meaning making, which in the Portuguese Revolution, needs to be read through the implementation of the ‘grammar of change’.

The US American artist and writer John Cage elaborated extensively on the notion of silence from the perspective of music and sound art.60 In the audio-visual essay ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage (2009) reflects on the performative value of language in a composition called ‘conversation’. By drawing on an experience he had during a dinner with friends, Cage wrote an essay in the format of a musical composition. The situation that prompted the essay was the following: after dinner his friend, the US American composer David Tudor, left the conversation and sat in a corner, fiddling around some papers. While all the guests were engaging in a conversation, Tudor was silent and eventually not really caring about what was going on. After a while, during a pause in the conversation, someone asked Tudor why he was not joining the party. Tudor replied back saying that he had not left the party. In fact,

60 One of his most well-known pieces of experimental music and sound art, titled 4’33 (1952), is based on the performance of a non-sound composition. Cage designs a sound piece where the performers sit in front of the audience for the duration of the four minutes and thirty three seconds without playing any instrument. The performer reads the silent notes and changes the pages until the piece is done. (Cage, 2009).

182 he was actually part of his friends’ entertainment. He answered: ‘This is how I keep you entertained.’ (Cage, 2009, p. 108).

Reflecting on the question posed by Cage’s friends, it seems like Tudor had left the party, while in fact he was still there. Seeing David Tudor’s presence as a paradoxical absence has an immediate relation to the ways in which (his) silence is perceived in his friends’ understanding of belonging to the party or gathering. Witnessing the situation, what called for Cage’s attention was how Tudor’s physical presence did not account for participation.

To question Tudor’s participation in the party is to privilege silence over his physical attendance, even if he is sitting in the corner. Hence, I argue that excluding him from the hangout is not based on the fact that he left the party, but on his silent ‘participation’ in the conversation, or even, one could say, non- participation at all. In this reading, the conversation is the sign for the totality of the gathering. In the described situation, being in dialogue (talking, nodding, etc.) becomes the primordial signifier for ‘dinner party’.

Another aspect that can be sensed in this situation is that ‘silence’ is not only ‘being in silence’—i.e., not talking, while busy with the papers. Silence could also mean that words, phrases, and opinions uttered by his friends are silencing Tudor’s own mode of communication—which in this case can only be read by his friends as non-participation. But what about considering that Tudor enacts an unfolding performativity of attendance? If Tudor’s ‘different/other’-participation is not being considered, then failing to acknowledge his presence can be seen as a way of silencing his participation as another component of the event. What this situation brings to the reading of silence is that modalities of readership of the dinner party render Tudor’s actions and presence non-functional within standardized notions of participation, i.e., taking part in the communication by voicing his opinion, nodding, looking at the interlocutors, etc.

What is of interest in this situation within the context of my research is Cage’s address of the multiplicities of silences involved in ‘being-together’ and their impact on the conception of participation in the overall event. According to the

183 artist, silence and peripheral participation are both embedded in the act of talking or making sounds, or any other collective and ‘consensual’ practice that takes place at the ‘focal point’ of the event. By being in the corner and not taking an active role in the conversation, Tudor is not removed from the event of the gathering. However, his silence leaves him, arguably, in a liminal and ambiguous position to the event.

What we re-quire is silence ; but what silence requires is that I go on talking . (…) But now there are silences and the words make help make the silences .

(Cage, 2009, p. 109 [author’s editing])

In Cage’s piece the silence (of his friend) and the act of being engaged in a conversation are not differentiated. Instead, his work proposes an intertextuality between both registers, hence: creating a tension between speech, silence and the ‘focal point’ of the event (i.e., conversation within the dinner party). Therefore, silence and sound interplay in a sort of interdependence between one another, being at the same time, in a complementary disjunction (dialectical tension). One’s silence is fundamental for the interlocutor’s speech to be heard, Blanchot asserts in one of his texts about ‘Interruption’ (Blanchot, 1985). In the same way, one’s speech silences other coexisting voices or gestures, rendering the latter less significant and, eventually, speechless during the ‘violent’ and ‘sonorous’ event.

Before continuing, I need to further explain the expression ‘focal point of the event’ for the sake of clarity. Going back to the example of the dinner party, one could say that the conversation between friends takes place within the time and

184 space of the event, being the conversation one of the event’s many components. However, seeing the participation of David Tudor as not taking part in the event, changes the relationship between dinner party and conversation. The question addressed to Tudor, ‘Why don’t you join the party?’ (Cage, 2009, p. 108), renders evident that the conversation is read as the representative whole (‘focal point of the event’), leaving Tudor’s action outside of its circumscription.

The latest aspect leads my argument to the third and last remark about the modality of readership and the field of signification that are at play in this situation. Cage highlights the interconnectivity between sound and silence, and the needed alternation between them. For Cage, silence is a rich materiality of aural textures and signification that tend to be undervalued by the hierarchies of sounds and music. Part of his work was dedicated to the creation of a new framework able to read silences as a complex landscape of sounds. Cage’s work expanded the territory of sounds in order to include the so-called silences within the sensorial and signifying capacities of sounds.

In conclusion, Cage enacts a series of incursions around the notion of silence that allow the term to open up to other readings and ‘sonorities’. By interconnecting the silenced presence of Tudor and the conversation in the dinner party, Cage de- hierarchizes the focal point of the sonorous event, and expands it to seemingly asignifying sounds operating in its periphery, which tend to be seen as silent or non-participant—like Tudor sitting in the corner. In this way, I argue that Cage’s expansion of silence’s readability: a) integrates the peripheral and seeming asignifying gestures within the event; and b) calls for a more complex array of ‘senses of making-sense’ able to engage with silence’s meanings. Silence and noise are not only a result of a hierarchy of sonorous events, but also two coexisting phenomena bounded to a dialectical tension.

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‘The Name Amílcar Cabral Was Never Revealed to Me in My History Books’61

We need to destroy the past: it is gone; at any moment, it might reappear and seem to be and be the present . Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we. Most anybody knows a-bout the future and how un-certain it is .

(Cage, 2009, p. 110 and 111 [author’s editing]62)

John Cage’s definition of silence helps to address the textures of the speechlessness of violence left on the fringes of meaning in the narrative of the revolution and its emancipatory discourse. Under the logics of transformation and change, the ‘repressed-oppressed’ are prevented from revolutionizing, sitting on the underflows of the revolution. One could also say that the repressed-oppressed are excluded from the ‘focal point of the event’, despite taking part in it. Revolution’s rhetoric of the new beginning is underwritten in universal beliefs that serve to keep the so-called unprivileged voices unchanged, static, and continuously oppressed.

Seeking the underflows of the revolution requires an expanded reading into its repercussions until the present days. My argument does not intend to go back to the evidences of the past and search for historical proofs to sustain my proposal.

61 The title of this section is taken from the film Conakry, directed by Portuguese artist Filipa César in 2013. The sentence is part of a text written and read in the film by Portuguese writer and researcher Grada Kilomba. Her text is about the founded reels of Amílcar Cabral, Guinea-Bissauan political leader and thinker, in official visits to Conakry and meetings with African political leaders pro-independence of African countries, and the Black Panthers members. 62 The spaces left blank between words follow the original editing of John Cage in the book Silence (2009).

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Instead, I aim to assess the affects of the ongoing present of the past revolution, in which, as Walter Benjamin notes in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’(2007), the past flashes upon the present disturbing the fixed readings installed in historical narratives. In disturbing the present, these flashes undermine the linearity of time allowing for the revolution to re-signify under new readings. (Benjamin, 2007, p. 255)

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Rilke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (Benjamin, 2007, p. 255)

The reading of Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba in the essay film Conakry (César, 2013) brings important nuances to this discussion. The film Conakry is one part of Filipa César’s long-term research project, which began with a focus on the influential role that Amílcar Cabral— leader of the liberation movement against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau—played in the cinematic culture of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: two former colonies under Portuguese sovereignty for more than four centuries until the process of decolonisation in 1974-75.

Interested in the role of cinematic culture during the emergence of the liberation movements, the Portuguese artist Filipa César also researched on the moving image of the generation of Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada, Josefina Crato and José Columba Bolama, all of whom were trained at the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte

187 e Industria Cinematográficos) between 1967 and 1972 at Cabral’s behest. These filmmakers documented the struggle for independence and the post- independence building. The film Conakry includes archive footages of post- independent Guinea Bissau (in the early 1970’s); the creation of a new country in the process of decolonisation.

Conakry merges the archival images selected by Filipa César—shown in the background—and Grada Kilomba’s reading of a text written by herself. In the background we can see official visits of Cabral to neighbouring countries and meetings between the Guinean leader and the Black Panthers’ members. Grada Kilomba faces the images and tells them (and us) their eventual story, a potential narrative, an attempt to take these images out of their historical silence. The images do not have sound, because it got lost when sound and image were archived separately. The only element remaining are the images. Her text and voice give speech to the silent reels. The sound of these images got lost, as much as the story that Kilomba has to tell us.

Fig. 23—Grada Kilomba reading her text in front of Amilcar Cabral’s reels in Conakry (César, 2013). Video still.

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In the presence of the images and to the silence of the reels Grada Kilomba reads about a non-inscribed history of the Portuguese post-revolution: decolonisation.

Decolonization What a beautiful word, written in images Picture by picture A visual language portrait in each one of these reels Here, cinema becomes a decolonial act.

I am speaking Because the sounds belonging to these images Have not arrived yet Maybe they never will

What I speak and have to say May never be what these reels want to tell. But I tell you and I re-assure you that the name: (The name of this man) Amílcar Cabral Was never revealed to me in my history books Nor mentioned in my classroom in Lisbon Where other Black children and I seat in the back My memories are not sweet (Even) Though they could have been (They could have been) memories of pride If these images have been shown to me earlier before They do not come late They come on time Still

Stokely Carmichael, the ex-Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, and his wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, enter the building;

Andrée Touré, Guinea-Conakry’s first lady arrives; Sékou Touré, the President of Guinea-Conakry, A guest of Cabral in his own country. (visiting this unique event)

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José Bolama Cobumba, Josefina Crato, Flora Gomes and Sana na N’Hada The four young filmmakers Who have just returned from Cuba (Document this moment, this movement They) capture blinks of strength Looks of competence and sovereignty Mixed with joy and fulfilment They capture the images that I would have liked to have seen as a child (They capture the decolonial act)

Cabral’s hand, gently points to a new identity His continent given a (new) body His history given a (new) language His people given a (new) shelter His language recovered

Numbers, Statistics, Documents, Maps, Pictures, Books, A whole room full of empirical evidence Against those intrusive memories of subordination

He points at the arsenal confiscated from the Portuguese army And unfolds the Portuguese flag to Andrée Touré, There is no bitterness in his gestures Nor in his words

In December 1966, during the liberation struggle, he writes a letter to the Portuguese soldiers:

‘Nesta quadra do ano, em que as famílias comemoram a sua existência, / In this period of the year, when families celebrate their existence, e se renova no coração dos homens a esperança de uma vida melhor, / And in the hearts of mankind there is a renewal of hope tenho o prazer de vos dirigir saudações fraternais e combativas, / I am pleased to send warm and combative greetings,

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em nome do nosso Partido e do nosso Povo. / In the name of our Party and of our People.] 63

Decolonization was a global act An act of humanism Where each single individual was invited to join All gathered in the same room Women and men Children and adults From North and South Speaking a common a virtual language This moments captured in topographic celluloid

Four months later, Amílcar Cabral was assassinated.

This raw footage not accessible Making us believe this has never existed.

Questions? (Kilomba in Conakry, 2013 [my emphasis])

Kilomba’s words go to recall the deeds of Cabral, and mainly, his unspoken story of the spoken history of Portugal. Cabral dedicated his life to the cause of the liberation of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, especially, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Alongside the armed struggle, Cabral developed a strong diplomatic activity to introduce his project to the international community and legitimise the struggle of his people. As a result, in 1972 he gave a speech in the Decolonisation Committee of the United Nations which led to the recognition of the independence of Guinea-Bissau as a sovereign country one year later (1973). However, the recognition of Guinean independence by the colonial power had to wait until the 25th of April, 1974. The independence of the colonies is recognised only after the Portuguese Revolution and the liberation war reached an end (Mattoso, 1998).

63 My translation from the original in Portuguese.

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Amílcar Cabral does not witness any of these events. On the 20th of January of 1973, six months before the United Nations recognised the independence of Guinea Bissau, Cabral is brutally assassinated in the capital city of Guinea- Conakry. Although the details of his murder were never clarified—as well as the murder of other African leaders for independence, such as, Samora Machel (Mozambique)—up until the present days, it is thought to have been a joint agreement between Portuguese army, PIDE (International Police for State Defence) and the complicity of Guinea-Conakry’s regime (Lopes, 2007, p. x).

In post-revolutionary Portugal, none of these stories were told to Kilomba—‘But I tell you and I re-assure you that the name: / (The name of this man) / Amílcar Cabral / Was never revealed to me in my history books / Nor mentioned in my classroom in Lisbon’ (Kilomba in Conakry, 2013). And if Grada Kilomba was not told about the name Amílcar Cabral in her classroom in Lisbon, I was not told either in the town where I grew up. It was not told to me, not only in my classroom when I was in high school, but also when I studied History in one of the most prestigious universities in the country (University of Coimbra), from 1999 to 2003. Like Cabral, his story was erased and silenced from taking part in the history of colonial Portugal and the subsequent decolonisation process.

Kilomba’s narrative today does not aim to repair the injustice of this absence in the past. It does not aim either to establish a sovereign ‘representative’ narrative that speaks for all peoples and histories, all images and all affects. Giving sound to the silent images implies a rewriting of the present, because it is in the present that the decolonisation past is constantly under a process of erasure. Kilomba’s speech is a memory of the past that struggles to inscribe a path through the ambiguous history of the present. And it is in the present that we speak and hear, and in this way, where the active traumatic processes of erasure inflicted by colonial powers lie. These processes comprise the continuities of post-dictatorial Portugal within the logics that the revolution has repressed.

Equally relevant is Kilomba’s presence when speaking to the muted reels. In the film Kilomba is seen sitting in between the projector and the projected reels on the

192 wall. The projected images merge her body with the images of Cabral meeting members of the Black Panthers, the President of Conakry and the first lady, among others. The Portuguese writer inhabits the intersection of the image (flash of light and the projected image), the voice (the one muted from the past, and her own narration in the present), and the narrative (factual and historical, or fictional and invented). The liminal space of the projected image is the stage of Kilomba’s ‘right to narrate’ as a way to interrupt the nebulous flux of unknowns, and expose her own position to the silenced violences (Bhabha, 2008, p. xxv).

Fig. 24 and 25—Grada Kilomba reading her text in front of Amilcar Cabral’s reels in Conakry (César, 2013). Video stills.

The words that are enounced are not only meant to retell the unheard history of Amílcar Cabral and the African liberation movements, but also to remap discourses and presences that have been (and are) annihilated and marginalised in the present. In the sentence ‘What I speak and have to say may never be what these reels want to tell you.’, Kilomba highlights the challenge of reading into the present the non-inscribed and untold history, and the intentional cultural unknowability underwriting these silences. What I mean by cultural unknowability is the intentional repression of histories. Non-inscribed in Portuguese history, the stories Kilomba has to tell us were made artificially foreigners to the cultural identity of the post-revolutionary Portugal.

It is in the liminal space of the speechless image that Kilomba wilfully refuses to repeat the ‘constituted knowledge’ of the African colonial past in post-

193 revolutionary Portugal. This is the same narrative that the post-revolution intentionally fails to acknowledge. Kilomba’s enunciation breaks the continuities of compliance with the logics of disciplines, which acts on the grounds of enlightened self-interest. The writer claims for the ‘right to narrate’, to voice a struggle, to name an absence, and as a consequence, claims a space where aesthetic distributions lie: in the re-circuit of signs, gestures, and gesticulations of the aesthetics of revolution. Kilomba’s enunciation expands the logic of participation and implication in the necessary ongoing process of telling and being told. (Bhabha, 2008)

The story narrated to us by Grada Kilomba in Conakry (2013) exposes the surplus and repressed-oppressed histories of the universal claims of revolution. But more than being aware of the semiotic systems that produce culture and its dissemination, undermining the ‘grammar of change’ of the revolution discloses the components hidden in its power structures. This is to say that, as in Kilomba’s stories, there are accounts left untold in the process of emancipation. Despite the claims for emancipation and a more just society, it is in post-revolutionary Portugal that Kilomba sat in the back of her classroom with other black students. She recalls: ‘My memories are not sweet / (Even) Though they could have been / (They could have been) memories of pride / If these images [of Amilcar Cabral] have been shown to me earlier before / They do not come late / They come on time.’ (Kilomba in Conakry, 2013)

Revolution and Its ‘Continuities’

(…) the men of the first revolutions—that is, those who not only made a revolution but introduced revolutions on to the scene of politics—were not at all eager for new things, for a novus ordo saeclorum, and it is this disinclination for novelty which still echoes in the very word 'revolution', a relatively old term which only slowly acquired its new meaning. (Arendt, 1990, p. 41)

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As I have argued, revolution is not only constituted by moments of change, but also by invisible, hidden and non-revolted presences, stagnations, and restrictions. Revolution is not in fact only the promise of the new and the emancipatory transformations; or the stories that I used to be told about when growing up in Portugal. Despite the controversy that this sentence might provoke, what we have learnt over the course of time is that revolutions may revolt ‘some things’, but in order to be recognised or signify as such, they also need to repeat their own structure. As a result, revolutions paradoxically claim novelty via the repetition of their intelligible manifestations. In doing so, they revolve around their discourses and gestures, over and over again, in order to signify as novelty and change.

As the etymology of revolution reveals, its origins had very little to do with its current meaning in human affairs. The word was originally used in astronomy and gained particular relevance in the natural sciences through Copernicus’ famous treatise of 1543, De Revolutionibus Orbium Colelestium (Jay, 2003, p. 17). In its scientific meaning, the word revolution retained its Medieval Latin meaning, signifying a return or rolling back; often suggesting a cyclical repetition in time. In astronomy, revolution refers to the regular, lawful motion of the stars, which turn away from the influence of man and are therefore irrefutable.

Contrary to the meaning in astronomy, where it signifies the recurring and cyclical movement, expected and stable, in human affairs revolution resonates with new and violent societal changes. According to US American historian Martin Jay (2003), the reasons why it ended up designating something different in relation to political affairs was, firstly and surprisingly, because of its reference to cyclical repetition. Jay explains that when the term was first used to mark a political transformation it referred to the restoration of the old order. Jay notes that:

(…) most of the prominent activists of the day understood their goal as the restoration of an earlier benign order that had been usurped by an innovating tyrant, who sought to undo the achievement of previous generations. (Jay, 2003, p. 17)

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The fact that the word ‘revolution’ meant originally restoration of the old order before the tyrannical one is not a mere oddity of semantics. The revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were intended and seen to be restorations of the older order, instead of constructions of a new political scenario. This terminology thus sprouted from a romantic idealisation of the past, where the distant times were seen as a better present, rather than an opportunity to build up a new beginning.

The second main reason for the appropriation of the word to the context of human affairs and political changes was motivated by the grandeur of celestial rotations implied in the astronomic term ‘revolution’. Historical events were considered to be in line with the grandiose astronomic cycles, taking from the latter their meaning as magnanimous and beyond human intervention. In a quasi-Badiouian reading of the event, revolution borrows its meaning from the belief that such a powerful event had to be influenced by external causes and made manifest without human intervention. In this way, the connection between astral events and their human counterparts provided a metaphysical explanation for the irresistible (and potentially devastating) violence and novelty of revolutionary processes (Jay, 2003, p. 17 and 18).

Novelty can only repose on the surface of things; it can only affect an aspect of things, and fades with the moment that induced it. In contrast, the beginning is, so to speak, rooted in the essence of a thing, since it is the beginning of this thing. It affects all its determinations, and does not fade with the moment, but endures with the thing itself. If one considers the thing which begins, and is novel because it begins, before it there was something else, but nothing of it. The novelty of the beginning thus grips us for two reasons: because of the contrast between the after and the before, the new and the old; and because of their opposition and their impact, their rupture. (Althusser, 1999, p. 6)

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In my view, the resonance of the term revolution with cyclical repetition is still pertinent in the reading of contemporary political transformations—but not in their sense of grandeur and fatality. I claim that there are two modes of repetition implied in the call for revolution nowadays: the semiotic system that reproduces the signifying signs of the ‘grammar of change’; and the silenced violences, as the recurrently effaced traces of the subjugated histories hidden in the underflows of constituted knowledges. In the first modality, the semiotic system is more than a set of linguistic signs, it is the very politics of aesthetics through which revolution is known and identified, spoken and remembered. As we have seen above, revolution runs on an assumption of a universal claim for freedom, emancipation and liberation.

The second repetition present in the term operates in a more invisible level. Undoubtedly connected to the first one, the silenced violences depend on a repetition of recurrent oblivion of the multiple oppressed who are or have been prevented from emancipating. What I have called the repressed-oppressed (the multiple oppressed of a despotic regime silenced during and after the revolution) is silenced by a hegemonic ‘grammar of change’. Performing in the underlevels of the revolution and repressed by a systemic violence, the silenced violences are, what I want to call, the ‘continuities’ of the post-revolutionary present.

In May 2015, Portuguese historian and researcher Marcos Cardão (2015) published Tropical Fado. Luso-Tropicalism in Popular Culture (1960-1974)64 which draws on the theory of luso-tropicalism, developed by Brasilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre during the last two decades of the Portuguese dictatorship and colonial war. Freyre’s luso-tropicalism characterises Portuguese imperialism, arguably, as being more benevolent with the occupied cultures than other imperial and colonial forces. Aware of the problematic claims of this theory postulated in the 1940’s and cherished by Salazar since the 1950’s, Cardão investigates modern popular culture in order to trace back the implementation of these ideas by Salazar’s ideology and propaganda until the revolution (Cardão, 2015).

64 This is my translation of the original title from Portuguese. The publication is not translated into English and its original title is Fado Tropical. O Luso-Tropicalismo na Cultura de Massas (1960-1974).

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Cardão’s introduction to the book is quite pertinent for the current discussion, because he gives several examples of how luso-tropicalist ideas can be sensed in contemporary popular culture in Portugal after the revolution. One of the most striking examples is the music band DaVinci, who led the Portuguese participation in the Eurovision music contest in 1989. Their song ‘Conquistador’, which won the Portuguese contest—and consequently represented Portugal against other European countries in the final contest—can be read against the background of the oblivious repetitions of post-revolutionary affects. The song openly praises the ‘heroic’ past of the Portuguese ‘Discoveries’ and the ‘great deeds’ of the Portuguese sailors and conquerors during more than five centuries of colonialism, slaughtering and cultural erasure. The lyrics state the following:

Era um mundo novo/ It was a new world Um sonho de poetas/ A dream of poets Ir até ao fim/ Going until the end Cantar novas vitórias/ Singing new victories

E erguer, orgulhosos, bandeiras/ And run up proud flags Viver aventuras guerreiras/ Live warrior adventures Foram mil epopeias/ It was thousand epics Vidas tão cheias/ Intense lives Foram oceanos de amor/ It was oceans of love

Já fui ao Brasil/ I have been to Brazil Praia e Bissau/ Praia and Bissau Angola, Moçambique/ Angola, Mozambique Goa e Macau/ Goa and Macao Ai, fui até Timor/ And I have been to Timor Já fui um conquistador/ I have been a conqueror

Era todo um povo/ It was a people Guiado pelos céus/ Lead by the skies

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Espalhou-se pelo mundo/ Spread themselves out in the world Seguindo os seus heróis/ Following their heroes

E levaram a luz da cultura/ And they took the light of culture Semearam laços de ternura/ Cultured ties of care Foram dias e dias e meses e anos no mar/ There were days and days, months and years in the sea Percorrendo uma estrada de estrelas a conquistar/ Travelling in a road of starts to be conquered

Fui conquistador, fui conquistador, fui conquistador/ I have been a conqueror, I have been a conqueror, I have been a conqueror (DaVinci, 1989, [my translation])

Fig. 26, 27, and 28—Video clip ‘Conquistador’, DaVinci, 1989.65 The band plays in front of the Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon, where the colonial exhibition of the Portuguese World was held (on the left), and in a Caravela (the Portuguese sailing ship developed in the fifteenth century) (centre and right). Video stills.

In order to further emphasise the nationalist and imperialist content of the lyrics, the visuals in the video-clip show the members of Da Vinci playing at historical monuments across the country (Da Vinci, 2007). The displayed monuments celebrate the ‘Discoveries’ and Portuguese imperialism, and speak to the discourses still present in the history books Kilomba and I shared as young students in contemporary Portugal. Amongst the ‘emblematic’ sites an aerial view

65 To watch the full video clip please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4maqpk6SiA

199 overlooks Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries), built by António Oliveira Salazar for the ‘Exhibition of the Portuguese World’ in 1940 (França, 2004). It was launched for the commemoration of the nine hundred years of the foundation of Portuguese nationality. The monument created by Cottinelli Telmo (1897–1948) and the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida (1898–1975) shows black people represented as slaves, among historical Portuguese figures and white conquerors.66

As a second example, I remark the cover of an independent newspaper during the football world cup in Brazil in the summer of 2014. On the 5th of March 2014 the cover of one of the Portuguese newspapers, Público—independent and centre- left—showed the title ‘Discovered Brazil’ (‘Brasil Descoberto’) occupying the whole page (Público, 2014, p. 1). This issue was published in the context of a series

66 Cottinelli Telmo and Leopoldo de Almeira worked actively for the regime in the areas of architecture, curatorial projects and public statues.

200 dedicated by the newspaper to the event taking place in Brazil. By the use of the word ‘Discovered’ and the reference to Brazil, the newspaper was quoting directly the colonial terminology used to designate colonial occupations and violence used against the former colonised subjects with no sense of self-criticism.

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Fig. 30—Público’s newspaper cover, Brasil Descoberto (Discovered Brasil), 5 March 2014.

Moreover, the ‘B’ of Brazil in the cover was composed by the initial ‘P’ of the newspaper title (Público), and the bottom part of the consonant was completed with a curved banana with the colours of Brazil’s flag. The readings of the tropical fruit as a symbol are, arguably, multiple, but in the context in which it is presented, it is a clear reference to the ‘Banana Republic’ phrase, popularised as a derogative expression to refer to Latin American countries. It was coined by US American writer O. Henry (1904), in his book Cabbages and Kings, and came to designate a subaltern country that operated as a commercial enterprise oriented towards private profit (White, 1984). Created in the beginning of the twentieth century, this phrase soon became a racist way to refer to countries of the so-called third world, with a particular unstable situation, marked by an economic dependence on exporting a limited-resource product.

Despite the two examples being separated in time by twenty-five years, the lyrics for the Eurovision contest in 1989 and the newspaper cover in 2014 are not isolated cases, nor the only two. They are examples of a systemic violence naturalised in the post-colonial structures and racial division that without being questioned, over populate post-revolutionary affects and the foundations of the new free country. In line with these ideas, one could argue that revolutions look forward, as much as they evolve and forcibly keep untouched and non-revolted presences subject to silent and quiet repetition.

The following section inquiries which epistemic tools are able to address the non- narrativised and unrepresented affects in the underflows of cyclical returning memories of the revolution. By looking at the work of Pedro Costa, in particular his latest film Horse Money (2014), the following section investigates epistemic tools that allow for an engagement and dialogue with underflows of unrepresented subjectifications in post-revolutionary Portugal. I want to demonstrate how these tools resist the grammar of novelty, are able to read the post-revolutionary

202 scenario, and engage with the underflows of the violent inscription by insisting on the seeming ‘sameness’.

In Horse Money, Ventura’s memories go back to his past, which he renders as fragmentary descriptions of the present. The ambiguity between past and present breaks the linearity of the grammar of change. Without a known space from where to speak, a representable identity and a clear narrative, Horse Money insists on the silenced violences that settle and underlie the rhetoric of transformation. What I mean by insisting is that it refuses engaging with new characters and scenarios, but rather ‘insist on’ (re-read) Fontaínhas and Ventura in order to read the sediments. There is no grammar from where to draw in order to represent Ventura. However, I argue that Ventura’s lack of an existing grammar is not due to his reality being new; it is rather an outcome of that which is intentionally left unspoken in the turmoil of the new beginning. Ventura, Vanda and, recently, Vitalina, are Costa’s companions in this journey, and Fontaínhas neighbourhood (in the outskirts of Lisbon) the meeting ground.

The Suspension of the Grammar of Change in Ventura’s Phantasmatic Memories—Towards In-conclusion

I am only the imaginary contemporary of my own present: contemporary of its languages, its utopias, its systems (i.e., of its fictions)… but not of its history of which I inhabit only the shimmering reflection: the phantasmagoria. (Barthes, 1977, p. 58-59 [my emphasis])

Portuguese director Pedro Costa has extensively worked with marginalised communities of the post-colonial and –revolutionary Portugal. His works started with Blood (Sangue) (1989) to the recently released Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014). Although his first two films are shot elsewhere (Blood in Lisbon and Down to Earth in Cape Verde), in 1995 Costa settles in the Fontaínhas slums,

203 one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Portugal, where makeshift shacks house black communities and drug-addicts since the last decade of the dictatorship—the 1970’s. Located in the outskirts of Lisbon, Fontaínhas becomes the landscape of Costa’s films until its demolition in the beginning of 2000’s. However, Costa’s incursion on the marginalised ‘anonymous’ does not end with the demolition. After the eviction the director follows Fontaínhas’ inhabitants through new housing constructions, streets, hospitals, and mental asylums. Each film seems to work as another layer to approach Fontaínhas without representing the place under the logics of political cinema—i.e., juxtaposing the conditions of the oppressed and scaling up to the causes of those conditions.

The director first visited Fontaínhas after returning from Cape Verde—a former Portuguese colony in West Africa—where he shot his second long feature film Down to Earth (Casa de Lava) (1995)67. While staying in Cape Verde the population gave him all sorts of things for him to kindly hand over to their relatives and friends living in Portugal. Due to postal costs, the unreliable mail service, and most of the times, the inexistence of a mail address to write on the envelope, Cape Verdeans would send souvenirs, food, and letters to their friends and relatives, via those who travelled from Cape Verde to Portugal. The only reference Costa had was the name of the neighbourhood of Fontaínhas—no specific street name or door number—and some people’s names. As Costa describes, when he finally returned to Portugal, he spent several days in the neighbourhood looking for the recipients of the things he carried with him (Costa, 2015b).

Since 1995 all his work evolves around Fontaínhas, its inhabitants, and its significance. Ventura, Vanda68, and, recently, Vitalina (people he met in the neighbourhood and who act in his films) are his companions in this journey.69 The

67 The plot develops around a Portuguese nurse and an immigrant worker in the building sites in Lisbon. Leão, the black immigrant from Cape Verde, finds himself in a comma after suffering from a work injury. Mariana, the nurse, accompanies the comatose Leão to Cape Verde, where his partner is arrested in Tarrafal prison. (Costa, 1995) 68 In one of the most recent waves of emigration after the beginning of the crisis (2008), Vanda left to Germany where she is working in a Spar Supermarket (Costa, 2015, n.p.). 69 Costa’s films shot about Fontaínhas up to the present day are: Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda) (2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha) (2006) and, the most recent, Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014).

204 first to arrive to the slums were Portuguese internal migrants from African colonies, which happened before the revolution. They were mainly men that came to work in the building sites of Lisbon. After the collapse of the dictatorship, more and more people left behind their families (and in most of the cases, their country destroyed by the colonial war) and risked their lives and health in the scaffoldings of the new construction boom. A great boom of construction happens after Portugal joined the European Union, which brought a great investment in infrastructures—public buildings, roads, etc. This is also the story of Ventura, the recurring character in Costa’s films and one of the first residents of Fontaínhas.70

In Costa’s view, the first film shot in Fontaínhas is not yet ‘with the people and in the neighbourhood’ (2015, n.p.). What Costa means it that, despite being shot in the slums, Bones (Ossos) (1997) still counts with a pre-existing script, ‘professional actors’ and a heavy apparatus of production. Which conditions that Costa would change after Bones was completed. It is while working there that Costa realises that the cinematic machinery of lighting, sound, cranes, and assistants do not permit the flexibility needed to establish a dialogue with the severe reality of the inhabitants and with the inhabitants themselves. In subsequent films, Costa explores a different strategy, which is meant to avoid settling for a mere depiction of ‘what happened’, and instead helps establish the film as ‘taking part’, and as of being present. ‘Cinema is about being present. And I wanted to be present.’, Costa states. (Costa, 2015, n.p.)

Discarding the burdens of production, and only counting on three crew members and makeshift lighting, the new filming conditions mark the aesthetic idiosyncrasy of Costa’s work. In several interviews, Costa explains the difficulties in negotiating between the heavy constraints of planning and scripting and his attempt to put cinema at the service of the ‘fleeting’ subject in Fontaínhas. The affects and effects of the marginalised could not be defined by a script written beforehand, or captured by a sophisticated cinema apparatus. As Costa mentions in an interview, instead of providing new possibilities the burden of production defines the ‘event’ a priori—because it demands anticipating all the filming according to the written

70 Ventura arrived on the 29th of August of 1972. (Rancière, 2009b)

205 script. With a tone of irony Costa explains how changing the direction, idea or script while shooting, not only takes a temporal toll on the project, but also means a cut of millions of euros for an already ‘skinny’ budget. (Costa, 2015).

Fig. 31—Ventura and Vitalina in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Still.

His decision to shoot without artifices and heavy apparatuses profoundly marks the aesthetics of his work. Filming in semi-dark and narrow rooms gives a grim and intimate feeling to the scenarios and the characters—or collaborators, as Costa likes to call the actors of his films (Costa, 2014). It would be wrong to call them actors since they are not acting, but collaborating with Costa in the narration. Ventura and Vanda (and recently Vitalina) are active collaborators in the scripts—or semi-scripts—and are not expected ‘to act’ as themselves. They put cinema at work in a conjuncture composed of lost memories, haunting stories, and silenced violences. The stories and lives of Ventura and Vanda are not necessarily explored as fictional pieces, nor as social-realist portraits (like social realism genre). Instead, they are the vehicles of a long-term dialogue with the fleeting subjectifications at the margins of Portuguese society. In this way, Costa’s works can be seen as exploring the silenced infrastructures of the post-revolution through the means of film.

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At the first glance it could be suggested that Costa’s work is representing the (mis)fortune of the exploited. However, as Rancière argues, Costa’s cinema is not what is used to be called ‘political cinema’ (2009b, p. 53). According to Rancière, Costa never scales up the scenario of Fontaínhas to show the causes of the black migrant’s living conditions—for instance, the machine demolishing the shacks of Fontaínhas without previous notice; the capitalist ‘regeneration’ of the urban landscape around the neighbourhood; the evictions; and the working conditions in the building sites; just to name a few. These films look for another way of telling stories without stigmatising the black communities under the top-down identities of ‘illegal migrants’. First, because this terminology abruptly generalises the diversity of realities, and second, because ‘illegal’ erases the post-colonial interrelations that help understand the oppression and confinement under which these people live.

He [Ventura] is not only the emergence of what is, of a historical, social and political contingency; heavy and unjust. Asserting this would put the film on the side of representation and denunciation. (Guerreiro, 2009, p. 204)

In Costa’s latest film, Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014), Ventura ‘tells’ his memories of the revolution. The film is a result of a long dialogue with Ventura about his experiences when the soldiers went to the streets and liberated the country from the ties of the dictatorial regime. Although this theme is already present in Costa’s previous films (Colossal Youth, 2006), the outcomes of the revolution in the life of the internal black migrants coming from the African colonies, gained a stronger relevance in Horse Money. I want to focus here on Horse Money due to its treatment of the repressed-oppressed presences and histories that underscore the interplay between affects and silent grammars of the post-revolution. Following the analogy to Cage’s example of David Tudor’s hyperexpressive mute presence, Costa’s films register the unprocessed densities and the silenced presences in Portugal post-revolution.

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In the 1970’s, when the revolution happened, Pedro Costa and Ventura were both in Lisbon. Costa recalls:

I was very lucky to have been a young man in a revolution, really lucky….And I was discovering a lot of things, music and politics and film and girls, everything at the same time, and I was happy and anarchist and shouting in the streets and occupying factories and things like that — I was 13 so I was a bit blind. It took me 30 years to discover that Ventura had been at the same place, at the same time, crying, very afraid, of what I was doing, and what the soldiers were trying to do. So this is an interesting thing. I was shouting the slogans, the common revolutionary words with the banners and the stuff, and he was hiding behind the bushes with his comrades, the black immigrants, that had started coming in 1968 1969 from all the Portuguese ex-colonies. (Costa, 2014 [my emphasis])71

Costa’s declarations reveal the differences in the experiences of the oppressed of the regime and allow for a glimpse at the multiplicity of oppressed. The revolution did not happen for everyone under the ties of the dictatorship. As the Mozambican writer Mia Couto wrote in Vinte e Zinco (in English Twenty and Zinc—a play on words between the phonetics of ‘twenty five’ and the material ‘zinc’, used to build the precarious shacks of the African communities in the slums of Lisbon); after the 25 April 1974, the African communities had still to wait for their revolution to take place. (Couto, 2014) The former colonies were only recognised as independent countries by the coloniser one year after. However, it is important to note that each process of independence was different and was concluded in different timings.

What seemed to be a burst of happiness for all after the repression of the dictatorship, is undermined by Ventura’s memories and haunting recollections. Black people, like Ventura, were not in the public squares, raising posters, occupying factories and properties, and chanting the revolutionary words. The

71 Q&A with Pedro Costa conducted by Mark Peranson after the projection of Horse Money at the Locarno International Film Festival, August 13, 2014.

208 socialist dream had a very different face for those that were not recognised by the revolutionaries as being part of the Portuguese present. During the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC), people like Ventura were hiding in the woods in Lisbon, running away from the military who chased and abused the black migrants.

My reaction, first time I have heard him [Ventura] telling these stories, was to go the newspapers archive and search for the newspapers of the first of May 1974 [first free demonstration one week after the fall of the dictatorship]—it was close to my home, I was there. In none of those pictures is there one black face. […] Ventura was right. He is telling the truth. Black people were all hidden. 400.000 people hidden in parks, houses and caves. (Costa, 2015)

It is after realising the differences between both experiences that Costa decides to make Horse Money. Without describing Ventura’s stories, the film embodies another incursion into his ghostly memories. Unconcerned with facts and official narratives—not even in the sense of trying to (at least directly) debunk them—the plot grasps the traumatised memories of Ventura and its non-inscribed traces in the present. (Gil, 2007)72 By making use of an un-narrativised script, typical of Costa’s films, the stories told by Ventura—sometimes staged through silences and enigmatic looks—take the viewer on a convoluted drift around memories and traumas. These drifts travel through hospitals, prisons and hospices around Lisbon.73 Although the buildings are currently in use, the lack of maintenance stresses its obscure, subterraneous, and overlooked conditions; which resonate with the aesthetics of Fontaínhas and Vanda’s bedroom—the set-up of one of Costa’s films.

72 Portuguese philosopher José Gil devised the term non-inscription to designate the lack of historical reflection in Portugal during the dictatorship and its consequent democratic period. Although the end of the dictatorship served to end several forms of repression, it did not resolve a still existing problem of the culture of fear. He argues that fear is inherited, and once interiorised, more unconsciously than consciously, is an integral part of Portuguese subjectivities. (Gil, 2007) 73 The use of hospitals, prisons and hospices can be seen as an intertextuality with Foucauldian notion of ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault, 1984), to where, in modern society, the ill and accused are set aside from the general society and from the eyes of the onlookers.

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Fig. 32 and 33—Ventura (on the left) and Ventura and Tito Furtado (on the right) in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

In the film, we are told about Ventura’s illness—he was diagnosed with schizophrenia a long time ago. As a side effect of the pills he is taking for his ‘nervous disease’ Ventura’s hands tremble visibly. It is in his hospital bed that Ventura is visited by friends and relatives. In a voiceover, Ventura takes the audience through the multiplicity of sufferings of those visiting him:

At any rate, we learn that one visitor, Delgado, set his house on fire with his family inside, and never spoke again; Benvindo fell from the third floor of a construction site; Lento sold drugs to supplement his laborer’s income, and got hooked. One of the company remarks, with bleak fatalism, “We’ll keep on falling from the third floor… We’ll keep being severed by the machines… We always lived and died this way.” (Romney, 2015)

Some of these characters are already known to the audience of Costa’s work. But Horse Money introduces another mysterious character: Vitalina, who recently arrived in Portugal from Cape Verde. Few months upon her arrival Costa and Ventura meet her. Costa was looking for derelict interiors when he and the crew found Vitalina living in one of these houses. In the film she tells the story of how she arrived in Portugal. She invested the little money she had on a plane ticket to

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Lisbon, only to arrive three days late for her husband’s funeral. Her husband is another forgotten sans-papier from Cape Verde who died working in the construction sites.

Vitalina’s presence and whispery speech patterns, portray a glazed aspect; they contribute to create a spectral aura that floats in a present full of reminiscences of the past. The status of the ‘recently-arrived’ shows that the ones hiding on 25 April 1974 are not gone; they have never been gone, their stories do not belong to the past. Ventura’s illness and Vitalina’s fortune obliquely intersect in the actualisation of the presences of the revolution. Not the ones that I was told in school and when growing up in Caldas da Rainha, or even in the University of Coimbra, but the ones that were intentionally left in the shade. The audience becomes aware of their unnarritivised relation: the revolution, the ‘repressed-oppressed’ in the slums, and the invisible sans-papier coming from the former African-colonies in contemporary Portugal.

Pivotal in this interplay of unreconciled memories is Ventura’s juxtaposition of the past and the present. When he is asked what date and time it is in the present, he remembers Spinola (the first president after the revolution, of the Salvation Junta and formerly the Governor of Guinea Bissau during fascism) and tells he is nineteen years old. It is a strange actualisation and temporal overlap.

Fig. 34 and 35—Ventura and Vitalina (left), and Vitalina (right) in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

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One of the most striking references to the historical event is the appearance of ‘freedom soldiers’ in two scenes. In the so-called Portuguese collective memory, these troops portray the liberation of the country, but the memories of Ventura unsettle this narrative. In one of the most compelling scenes in the film, Ventura is corned and troubled by a tank in a dark night in the streets of Lisbon. Instead of being populated by the enthusiasm of the people, the streets are empty. It is only Ventura and the tanks—no more eyewitnesses. They follow a terrified Ventura, while he raises his arms in a sign of surrender. However, the tank keeps advancing in his direction.

Fig. 36 and 37—Ventura and the ‘freedom fighter’ in the elevator in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Stills.

The references to the revolution in Horse Money neither meant to document past events, nor to make an inventory of previous historical forms for a present day emancipated public. Rather, Costa’s depictions operate through the logic of what Walter Benjamin would call the dialectical image, which sits on the threshold of dreaming and awaking. It is in the ambiguity between dreaming and awakening that the haunting present communicates. In other words, Costa evokes the phantasmatic contemporaneity and materiality of the post-revolutionary affects in order to make sense of the untold stories. Horse Money brings a ‘timeless immobility’ and a sense of contemporaneity to the revolution allowing for an actualisation of their meanings. As Costa stated:

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It’s not really a film about the past or the future, there’s only present. It’s very in the present, this film, I think. I’m starting to like the film now, because it doesn’t give you time to think, like in the old days, it just is. This condition, the film plays itself in an everlasting present. At least this elevator is a machine that says you leave now and you are a prisoner of your present. And you will die in the present. You will die now, you will suffer now…I don’t want to scare you. And film is always in the present. There are no films in the past, in the future: it’s today, it’s now, and it’s over. Ventura’s always saying, “I’m 19,” but of course he’s not 19 years old. (Costa, 2014)

It is in the shades and calaboose of the present that we look through the revolution in Horse Money. Costa and Ventura have no rush for a ‘new beginning’ in Horse Money’s ‘revolution’. Nor they aim to signal the emancipatory transformations of past events. Instead, they want to insist on the dismissed repetitions of the everyday in the slums, and in the ghosts of de-colonisation. Here, there is no haste for a new and hopeful future to come. What we can sense in this film is that there are too many overlooked exposures at play in the non- inscribed affects of the post-revolutionary present. These affects, as I have argued, are left as un-narrativised particles in the urgency of a new beginning and under the claims of the grammar of change. Racism, social injustice and inequity are never away from the normative logics of the everyday, they are rather internalised in the quotidian practices. Horse Money takes from the affects stranded between these states, and presents a journey that tackles the phantasmatic memories of our present; in a mode that very few contemporary projects dare to tackle.

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Fig. 38—Ventura in Horse Money (Costa, 2014). Video Still.

Conclusion

Horse Money does not comply with historical facts; it recognises that the complicity between conventional narratives and the historical representations (with heroes and great deeds) are not capable of dealing with repressed phenomena. Recognising the limitations of history is to understand that repressed phenomena can no longer be read in opposition or binary, but in the sediments of everyday repression. Costa’s films are not heroic depictions: Ventura is not a hero who rescues our memory from the sad entropy of forgetfulness. Ventura is a glance at the course of time, and interrupts time in order to make it emerge as a new temporality that is based on the remnants of the hidden histories and presences—reinforced in the architectonic background of Fontaínhas, the hospitals, the tunnels, the shacks, the building sites. However, this present is not a configuration of an intended real-time, a depiction of the ‘now’. It is a disjointed time that floats besides history and its linear narratives.

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Horse Money disrupts the linearity of the grammar of change. This film brings the continuities of the revolution that were kept away from the space of appearance and from manifestation, despite overlapping with the making of the revolution. Both, Grada Kilomba in Conakry and Ventura in Horse Money, undermine the monolithic notion of revolution by introducing narratives and presences that allow for a glance to the disquieting political aesthetics of silencing and forgetting.

Although the ‘grammar of change’ cannot be cast aside the tradition of the new that it claims, Horse Money proposes modalities of readability of the foundations of the new that do not claim for novelty or radical transformation. In fact, what Horse Money does (and ultimately, Costa’s body of work) is to propose modalities of readership of the oppressed affects without embarking on a claim for a new beginning. This is done by ‘insisting’ on the same socio-political landscape and inscribing its unnarratised affects in a loose temporality where ghosts and traumas disrupt the systems of representation of the revolution. In this way, the call for a universal structure of change is suspended through the exposure to the non- revolted ‘continuities’.

I claim that to read the complexities of affects of the Portuguese post- revolutionary present requires a repetitive insistence capable of engaging differently and reading beyond hegemonic logics. ‘Insisting’, as a reading strategy, refrains from engaging with the tropes of change and novelty, recognising naturalised discourses and readings that are acritically internalised. Moreover, ‘to insist’ on the seeming sameness—the non-revolted affects of the revolution— enacts multi-layered understandings of effaced and surplus silences—i.e., the underflows hidden in the sublevels of the event.

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VISUAL ESSAY

The Palm Trees

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The Palm Trees Scene in Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977). Video stills: 2’26-2’50’’

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CONCLUSIONS

Overview

Exposing the Event. A Curatorial Investigation of the Aesthetics of Novelty in the Portuguese Revolution created a set of epistemic tools (‘non-event’, ‘sensing’, and ‘continuities’) that seek to contribute to the curatorial practices as an ‘aesthetic’ investigation. These practices operate in the intersection of visual cultures, critical theory and exhibitionary practices. The thesis activated the notion of ‘aesthetics’ not as a discipline that investigates artistic practices, but rather (internalised and unintentional) manifestations of the thinkable, seeable and sayable within the Portuguese Revolution. The conceptual move allowed for an expansion of the field of analysis of the curatorial and the ‘exhibitionary’. The curatorial and the exhibitionary provoke innovative readings for aesthetic forms in which event, discourses, and representations are made manifest.

The aforementioned epistemic tools contributed to create modalities of readership for ‘exhibition’, which is located beyond ‘exhibition-making’ discourses, and gesture towards a multiple array of unintentional exposures. In this thesis, ‘exhibition’ is actualised as a field of exposures always already in resonance; before any intentional gesture of exhibiting. However, the ‘always already’ does not mean a chronological ‘before’, but undermines the idea that exhibition results of an intentional gesture of making objects and persons public. Rather, ‘always already’ points toward the remnants and affects beyond the intentional gesture of making public; beyond the optical sense; and beyond the physical and conceptual access implied in exhibition-making.

The new epistemic tools for the curatorial were produced by intersecting exhibition-making’s principles—i.e., event, access, visibility, interpretation and representation—with an expanded field of cultural production. The Portuguese Revolution and its historical legacy framed the aesthetic investigation of the means of production of event and discourse, as well as what the apparatuses that

222 are left unmentioned and are invisible. ‘Non-event’, ‘sensing’, and ‘continuities’ enabled engagements with (rather than forms of scrutiny) modalities of exposure; these in turn were claimed to be capable of reading the Portuguese Revolution through its present affects.

It is the intention of this dissertation to also respond to the need for new ways of curatorial engagement. For this reason, my proposition is a departure from ‘exhibition’ as a measurable space consisting of walls, lighting system, display devices and so on. This dissertation takes exhibition as a set of exposures from where one can ‘sense’ the aesthetics of revolutionary components and their operation in the ‘underflows’ of everyday life. Contrary to exhibition-making, ‘exhibition’ as an epistemic tool is capable of enacting new ways of engaging with fleeting subjects and hidden gazes.

The ‘non-event’, the ‘sensing’, and the ‘continuities’ are able to question and suspend the logics of novelty and emancipation in revolutionary events, and thus serve to grasp silenced and overlooked micro-events taking place within the always manifold event. An insistence on the declamatory system of signification of event and revolution during the course of the three chapters has aimed to open up the event (aesthetically) to a series of under-acknowledged instances that can no longer be ‘accessed’ through its historical significations. The constellation of affects made available in the critical assessment of mechanisms of event production calls for a non-linear modality of readership.

‘Access’, as proposed by Nancy, implies a previous identification and appropriation of ‘what to know’, undermining the very attempt of grasping the ‘hidden’ and ‘silenced’ presences of the revolution. Therefore, this thesis’s proposition grounds ‘knowing the revolution’ on ‘being-among, being-between, and being against’ in remoteness and contact without access.

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a matter of this first of all and only? Or again: why does one have to determine “access to” a priori as the only way of making-up-a-world and being-toward-the- world? Why could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being- between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without “access”? (1997, p. 59)

Instead of accessing the Torre Bela farm and the traumas of Ventura as apriori identities and systems of signification, I propose ‘being among’ and ‘being against’ as a way to foster a non-linear mode of inquiry able to navigate the under- acknowledged zones of affects (Gray, 2008). In order to connect seemingly non- related topics and ideas—for instance, Harlan’s experience in Torre Bela in 1975, and my visit in 2015—I have used the metaphor of the screen that is at the same time: the screen of the film; the screen that intervenes in the formation of an event (Deleuze, 1992); and the exhibitionary screen of juxtapositions of visual and theoretical material.

The epistemic tools produced in the previous chapters are considerations for a research that does not look for novelty or accumulation of more data about a subject matter—e.g., the how?, who?, which consequences?. Instead, what the mentioned set of tools stages is the insistence on the consensual and tacit complicities found in the everyday affects of the revolution in the present. As examples of tacit complicities in everyday affects, I named: the reading of Torre Bela’s event as a popular revolutionary occupation; Wilson’s political engagement; and the novelty and emancipation of the post-revolutionary Portugal. Without undermining the political, social and colonial transformations brought by the revolution, this thesis staged a space of inquiry ‘toward-this-world-of-mine’ where I confront my own broken readings of this historical moment.

Working with cinematic material and the experiences they provoke—especially Harlan’s participation in the documentation of the ongoing event, Kilomba’s narration and Ventura’s memories—affects our conceptualisation of the Portuguese Revolution. The demands, personal and conceptual, that emerged

224 from my exposure to the material challenged my own previous knowledge of the Portuguese Revolution and its systems of meaning within the broader Portuguese cultural sphere. The attempt was not to respond to the questions it posed by bringing new not-yet-unveiled information about the revolution in order to rewrite its significance and narrative. Rather, what this dissertation inaugurates is a space of investigation that recognises that more than ‘unveiling the unknown’, there are always already present exposures which are prevented from signifying in the repetition of the everyday. Moreover, this thesis argues that what is ‘always already’ there—to which we are already in exposure, both to the given logics and to what we do not yet-recognise—can no longer be taken as unknowns. They are internalised processes of erasure and oblivion inscribed in everyday affects.

However, my proposition does not claim that the historical conceptions of revolution are disabled by the epistemic tools devised in the thesis. What this research addresses is the possibility of looking through the mechanisms that limit the systems of signification of ‘change’, ‘novelty’ and ‘emancipation’, as historical and situated constructions. In that way, the revolutionary event is interrogated not only as a space and time of transformation, but as declamatory rhetoric that fails to recognise under-acknowledged affects. Recognising under-acknowledged affects of the revolution required, in this thesis, the juxtaposition of cinematic material, visual cultures, and theoretical readings, which dispersed the monolithic definition of a grandiose event and allowed for glimpses at its remnants and afterimages.

The Three ‘Modalities of Exposure’ for Curatorial Practice

The three terms staged in this dissertation—i.e., the ‘non-event’, the ‘sensing’, and the ‘continuities’—actualised exhibition beyond exhibition-making and contributed to define the curatorial as an aesthetic investigative practice. The terms, in their operative and performative capacity, are staged through exhibitionary juxtapositions between material (theory and visual cultures) and intersections between: the debate around the ‘exhibitionary complex’; the

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Portuguese historical legacy of the revolution; essay, militant and documentary films74; and systems of signification and modalities of readership of ‘novelty’.

The staged investigative gestures are capable of:

- examining the exhibitionary apparatus as a mechanism of governance; - setting up ‘exhibition’ and ‘revolution’ as a field of ‘always already’ intentional and unintentional, multiple and multidirectional ‘exposures’; - investigating the interstices and barely perceptible instantiations of knowledge production, enunciation and discourse formation; - juxtaposing previously non-related material and ideas, driven by affects of intellectual disquiet (internalised processes of erasure and oblivion inscribed in everyday affects)

While these concepts have been devised in response to the generated discussion around ‘revolution’ as a highly visible event that holds its own professed faith in novelty, the epistemic tools can be broadly generalised. That is to say that the resulting theoretical framework can be applied to similar conjunctions of epistemological enterprises and interrogations in the expanded field of cultural production and curatorial practice. Practitioners and researchers working in the field of historical legacies, cinema studies, exhibition and museum studies, curatorial practices, and visual cultures, can make use of these epistemological tools to help cultivate new aesthetic investigations and bring the previous nonrelated, yet sensed, as valid research material.

The assemblage of the three curatorial modalities of exposure was achieved through the aesthetic investigative forays staged in each chapter. In the first chapter the mechanisms that govern the production of revolutionary events were interrogated within the framework of Torre Bela (1977)—a documentary film set in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution (1974-1976). The first investigative

74 Torre Bela (Harlan, 1977); Conakry (César, 2013); and Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (Costa, 2014).

226 gesture created the speculative figure of the ‘non-event’, which is capable of interrogating mechanisms of event production and the reading of barely recognised instances taking place within the manifold micro-events.

In the second chapter, drawing on the first scene of Torre Bela, the notions of ‘access’ and visibility/visuality can no longer suffice the needs to further question the field of exposures in Torre Bela. Contrary to ‘access’ and ‘visibility’, ‘sensing’ enables entry points to the exhibitionary space of Torre Bela which are capable of addressing unrepresented gazes. In Torre Bela, the presence of the camera generates an awareness of the interplay between gazes: of seeing and being seen. The investigation of the interplay between gazes and its exhibitionary resonances lead the argument to Wilson’s secret desire to become an actor in ‘Europe’ after the shooting of the film.

In the last investigative foray of the curatorial, the revolution is analysed according to its different types of violence, hence: violence between opponents; violence of the new beginning; and affective violence. Focusing on the latter, the chapter maps indistinct and asignifying underflows of the revolution, where silenced presences are exposed to the official narrative of the emancipatory event in the present. The entry points to the silenced presences are provided by the speech given by Grada Kilomba in Filipa César’s Conakry (2013) and Ventura’s traumatic memories in the recounting of the revolutionary event in Pedro Costa’s latest film (Horse Money, 2014). ‘Continuities’ is the epistemic tool that enables us to read the non-revolting affects of the revolution in the present, which in turn undermines revolution, simply understood as an emancipatory political transformation.

The three chapters are set apart from the theoretical debate on the curatorial and exhibition studies. Each chapter stages the curatorial as an investigative practice that is able to recognise under-acknowledged affects in the aesthetic manifestations of revolution. In this way, I argue that the three epistemic figures of the curatorial refuse ‘knowing-in-depth’ (as in-depth implies accessing the core of the subject to obtain its truth, since it suggests both a primordial reading and an impartial approach). Rather, this dissertation entertains ‘knowing’ as reading on

227 the surface of the screen. Without meaning lack of thoroughness, the surface of the screen reminds us of the plane where the juxtaposed images, ideas and concepts meet and the ground where unexpected encounters take place. I argue that this is the plane of the curatorial.

‘Non-event’, ‘sensing’ and ‘continuities’ are conceptual notions that make sense of what otherwise seems vague and unfounded. These tools are motivated by errant and contingent encounters between remote surfaces—cinematic material, secret desires, hidden gazes, consensual silences, strong intuitions. The surface of the screen intervenes to create the ‘event of knowledge’ where fugitive affects, material and ideas are in touch (in contact or remoteness). The curatorial resembles the mirrors described by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (2002); surfaces where unexpected encounters happen and suddenly disappear. Metaphorically speaking, the curatorial is the dream-image of contingent constellations that actualise the ossified narrative of history in a glimpse. In this way, the curatorial as an investigative practice is able to: move across disciplines; intersect non- obviously related subjects; be driven by intellectual and conceptual disquiet; recognise intuition and contingent encounters; and find new ways of engaging with urgent and current issues and their fugitive affects.

The thesis reconfigured understandings of the contemporary post-revolutionary condition, such as: the subsumed events under the external manipulation of the major event; the secret desire of Wilson to become an actor; the hidden affects of Grada Kilomba sitting in the back of her classroom with the other black students in post-revolutionary Portugal; and the errant life path of Ventura in the outskirts and parks of Lisbon. These investigative forays are means to explore aesthetic manifestations, and to recognize how they continue to configure understandings of the contemporary post-revolutionary condition in Portugal.

The ‘Non-Event’

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Chapter One delves into the mechanisms that govern declamatory events and their aesthetic systems of representation. Events are known for interrupting history, the course of normativity and everyday affairs. They change the way we look at things and how we talk about the before and the after of the event. However, more than focusing on the transformations of the revolution, my analysis brings insights to the conditions under which the event functions and is made significant.

Harlan’s intervention over the course of the occupation in Torre Bela aids a reading of the event’s structure. What is seen in Torre Bela cannot be reduced to what happens in the framed image (moving images), but needs to be extended to the components at play in the staging of the event—hence, the ‘in-front-of- and ‘behind-the-camera’. This is to say that: the film crew, Harlan and cinematic apparatus are integral parts of the revolutionary event. Such assertion implies that the revolution and its dramatic means can no longer be thought separately. The produced figure of the ‘non-event’ recognises the ‘structurality of the structure’ (the binaries under which the notion of event is grounded and organised) (Derrida, 2001).

Acknowledging the power structures and mechanisms in the production of the event generated an approach to the barely noticeable occurrences and affects taking place during the grandiose event. The term ‘underflow’ emerges out of this understanding and serves to address what is taking place at the same time but fails to be recognised by the system of signification of the major event. If an event is (also) the repetition of a set of signifying gestures (made manifest by the ‘structurality of the structure’), there are occurrences that fail to be recognised by the evental space of signification. In that way, ‘underflow’ claims for a space of signification that is able to encompass the surplus of the declamatory event.

The theoretical implications of these findings are multiple. Firstly, the notion of the ‘non-event’ deconstructs the monolithic and historical event, while opening up the possibilities of readership for lateral or marginalised occurrences and affects that are equally implicated in the grandiose event. Secondly, the term ‘underflow’

229 recognises and addresses the asignifiying discourses and affects at play during the event. This conceptual move opens up event’s signifying structure to the silencing strategies operating under the grammar of change and transformation. The ‘non- event’ and the ‘underflow’ assess the seeming neutrality of the making of the event (Harlan’s presence), and puts into perspective (breaking down the hierarchy of event) the relevance of highlighting one occurrence over other.

The contributions of Chapter One to the field of the curatorial and visual cultures can also be applied to other cultural phenomena. ‘Events’ claiming novelty and originality, disruption and attention, can be found in all fields of cultural activity, including in formats used in the art field and curating. Performances, happenings, openings, exhibitions, and talks are interested in stressing the novelty and uniqueness of what they have to show. They present something new and most of the times non-repeatable. From biennials to performance, the ways in which the aforementioned activities claim novelty for themselves can no longer be decoupled from the power structures behind the manipulation of this discourse.

The ‘Sensing’

The first chapter expands the temporality of the event to the manifold micro- events already taking place before, during and after. The ‘non-event’ is the first epistemic tool to be advanced in this thesis, which is created to address the aesthetics of novelty in the context of the Portuguese Revolution—especially the occupation of the Torre Bela. Making use of the aptitudes of the ‘non-event’, the second chapter takes the open space of the event (that extends also to the in- front- and behind-the-camera) as a field of multiple and continuous exposures operating under diverse regimes of enunciation and attention.

Drawing on the inaugural scene in Torre Bela, Chapter Two speculates around the importance of visuality and vision (as social and cultural constructs) in the representation of the Portuguese Revolutionary ‘drama’ under the cinematic apparatus of Torre Bela. Contrary to the militant film in vogue during that time in

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Portugal, where certain tropes where expected (voiceover narration, short takes, direct political messages, and interviews to the people involved in the political actions across the country); Harlan opts for long sequences, direct sound and the total absence of a voiceover. The use of the cinematic tropes wilfully omits Harlan’s presence and his participation, inscribing Torre Bela in a ‘return to the lost real’ after fascism (Foster, 1996).

The tropes of realism used in Torre Bela can no longer be read only as a consequence of Harlan’s dramatisation of the real. Wilson’s secret dream brings new intensities to the representation and the staging of the event. Wilson, the active and ubiquitous member of the cooperative, holds the secret desire to become an actor and be taken by Harlan to Europe after the shooting of Torre Bela. His performance in Torre Bela is an opportunity to pursuit his dream and to make it come true.

It is through an analysis of the optical apparatus in Torre Bela that I identified common aspects and similarities with the scopic regimes of the exhibitionary space (Bennett, 1995). The film and the exhibitionary apparatus are mechanisms that render the displayed objects visible and accessible to a broader audience. The physical access to the exhibition opens the show to the interplay of gazes between audience and the displayed objects, and between the audience members. In a similar fashion, the camera in Torre Bela renders the squatters visible (to the camera, the crew, the potential audience of the film), at the same time that those being watched are also themselves eyewitnesses of their own occupation. ‘Seeing’ and ‘being seen’ inaugurates the space of the gaze in the ‘exhibitionary complex’, but also the mechanisms of self-control and surveillance—either in the context of the exhibition, or in the context of the cinematic space in Torre Bela.

Wilson understands this power dynamic too well. It is by over-representing his own drama (which arguably makes him Harlan’s favourite leader) that Wilson escapes the trope of realism and authenticity. The apparent paradox renders evident the unfolding performances at play in the space of the gaze (the awareness of seeing and being seen). Wilson is not a passionate squatter or a revolutionary

231 man driven by political ideologies, only. Wilson will to become an actor in ‘Europe’, is also a driver of his performance in Torre Bela. And it is by over- representing his own drama to Harlan’s depiction of the event that Wilson escapes the claim for realism and authenticity. Wilson’s response to Harlan’s gaze in the acting of his own life as a revolutionary young man, undermines Harlan’s manipulation and opens up the space of secrecy as a non-representable subjectivity in the space of gaze.

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